Just a quick note on how to get the VMware tools running on Debian Lenny on a Vsphere Virtual Machine.

From inside the vSphere client select you Debian Virtual Machine.
Now click with the right mouse on it and go to Guest, install / upgrade VMware tools.

This will virtually insert the VMware tools cd.

next … just type in the following:

mount /media/cdrom
cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz /tmp
cd /tmp
tar zxvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl  --default

Now you will get the VMware tools installed with the default settings, wich are good to go in most cases.