Failed Registration of app type 2

A colleague told me he was seeing some VMware issues on one of our servers.

Not being familiar with it, I did search around to see what I could find.

I quickly found kb.vmware.com/kb/2038263 which describes the exact issue.

From the KB “These warnings are related to the Unity feature of  VMware Tools for Fusion/Workstation. The unity feature is not used by ESXi, and therefore, reports these warnings.”

Essentially, VMware Tools is complaining because we are using ESXi and not Fusion/Workstation. Seems kind of silly to me… but what do we do?

The first thing they suggest is editing the Tools.conf, found

(For Win7, Server 2008+) C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Tools\

(For Server 2000, 2003) C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Tools\

Add to the tools.conf:

[unity]
Pbrpc.enable=false

And restart the tools service.

This unfortunately didn’t solve my issue though, so I had to continue with the second solution

Delete the unity.dll file located
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\plugins\vmusr

Again since, the unity.dll is related to Fusion/Workstation, deleting this file should have no impact on ESXi VMs.

After restarting the VMware Tools after this time, everything seemed to be fine once again.