In order to install VMware Tools On Ubuntu 12.04 you will be employing a two step process. First you will need to right click on the Virtual Machine in vSphere and choose “guest” > “Install/Upgrade VMware Tools” pictured left.
Next you will need to run the following commands in terminal. This procedure works for every version of Ubuntu from 10.04 up through and including version 14.04. Please make note that these commands can easily be pasted into a bash script and run that way. Also note that line 1 of the script will remove OpenVM Tools if they are installed and line 10 will install VMware Tools with the default options and will not require user input.
apt-get remove --purge open-vm* -y && apt-get autoremove -y sudo mkdir -p /media/cdrom sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom cd /media/cdrom sudo cp VM*.tar.gz /tmp cd /tmp sudo umount /media/cdrom sudo tar xzvf VM*.tar.gz cd vmware-tools-distrib sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d rm -r /media/cdrom