Installing VMWare open tools on RHEL5/Centos5

To install the latest VMWare open tools for RHEL5 or Centos5, first create a new file:

/etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo

And put this in it:

[vmware-tools]
name=VMware Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/[esx-version]/rhel5/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-KEY.pub

Replace [esx-version] with 3.5u2, 3.5u3, 3.5u4, 3.5u5, 4.0, 4.0u1, 4.0u2, or 4.1, depending on the ESX/ESXi version.

Then use yum to install the server version, as no gui tools needed.

yum install vmware-tools-nox

Verify installation by:

service vmware-tools status

Should be shown as running, if not then use same command above but 'start' instead of 'status'

You should be able to see for the guest that VMWare tools is shown as 'Unmanaged' so tools will need to be updated on each guest manually.