I keep running into an issue where VMTools will display a status of “not running” after rebooting some machines too fast, say after a Windows Update or just because they feel like it. One fix is to simply reboot the VM, but this is a little bit more involved so I looked up a command line script and came up with the following.
From the VM directly, open up a command prompt and type the following.
net stop vmtools net start vmtools
From another server on the domain open a command prompt and type the following.
sc \\servername-or-ipaddress stop "vmtools" sc \\servername-or-ipaddress start "vmtools"
Thats it!. With VMTools running, your VMs should be a little more responsive.