To resolve this error on your Eclipse all you have to do is
1. Copy the tools.jar from the jdk distribution on your machine to your local maven repository
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=jdk.tools -DartifactId=jdk.tools -Dpackaging=jar -Dversion=1.6 -Dfile=tools.jar -DgeneratePom=true
2. Add the following dependency in your pom.xml
<dependency>
<groupId>jdk.tools</groupId>
<artifactId>jdk.tools</artifactId>
<version>1.6</version>
</dependency>
When does this usually occur?
This occurred to me when I was using one of the Cloudera Hadoop binary as a dependency on my project.
https://maven.apache.org/general.html#tools-jar-dependency – this is the official way to do it.