Hello,
Today I burned an ESXi 5.1 iso CD and upgraded my ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.1. I use the free version on a server at home to learn about this product, so that I might use it someday at work. There's nothing of value in the unit so I'm free to experiment and mess things up if necessary. The ESXi server upgrade went smoothly. (Supermicro X9SCM-F, E3-1240, 16 Gb, 128 Gb SSD drive). I updated vSphere Client to version 5.1.0 next. This went smoothly too.
I have one guest at this point. Debian squeeze 2.6.32-5-amd64. It was working fine with ESXi 5.0. The vmware-tools installed fine in ESXi 5.0.
First I ran Update Virtual Hardware on the Guest machine. Next I booted the Guest. I mounted VMware-tools-linux-9.0.0-782409.iso under /media/cdrom0. Copied the VMware-tools-linux-9.0.0-782409.tar.gz to a local folder and extracted the files via "tar xvfz". Installed the tools via ./vmware-install.pl. The tools installed fine. The "install" actually fails at the /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl stage. Specifically, it cannot find the kernel headers I have loaded at /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-5-amd64/include.
Since this /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl is a Perl script, I loaded it into DDD and ran it next by next and step by step until I got to a point in the Perl where it calls:
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmware-modconfig-console --get-kernel-headers -k 2.6.32-5-amd64 -- -l "/usr/lib/vmware-tools"
This command returns an empty string in this Debian squeeze Guest. It's symbolically linked to something called appLoader. An executable that I cannot troubleshoot very well with just the "strings" program. Turns out this program is also used to "--validate-kernel-headers" too, so I'm at an impasse.
Suggestions welcome. Thank You for your attention.