I always forget how to do this and end up Googling for the answer. You may be doing the same right now.

The following example is on vSphere 5 with a Centos 6.x guest OS but I assume it will work with RHEL as well.

1) Initiate the VMware Tools installer (Guest -> Install/Upgrade VMware Tools)

 

2) From the command line in the Centos guest OS:

i) Mount the CD/DVD ROM drive

# mkdir /mnt/media

# mount /dev/cdrom/ /mnt/media

(You should get a message similar to: mount: block device /dev/sr0 is write protected, mounting read-only)

 

ii)  Copy the installation files from the media to a temporary directory

# cd /mnt/media

# cp /mnt/media/VMwareTools-8.6.0-446312.tar.gz /tmp

(Note: Your filename might be slightly different, so you could use cp /mnt/media/VM*)

 

iii) Extract files from tar

# cd /tmp

# tar -xzvf VMwareTools-8.6.0-446312.tar.gz

(-v is for verbose output. This lists each file name as its read from the archive)

 

iv) Run the VMWare Tools install script

# /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

Follow all the defaults by pressing “Enter” key.

When finished the media will eject itself automatically.

This should successfully install VMware tools into your Centos OS