If you are using a version prior to 5.5.3, you will want to follow this guide.

To install the VMware tools, start by choosing “Install VMware tools” from the menu:

You will see a new icon on your desktop, and a File Browser window should be opened immediately. If the file browser doesn’t open, just double-click on the cdrom icon.

You will see a file named VMwareTools-5.5.3-xxxxx.tar.gz. Right click it and choose Extract To. Pick a location to extract the files to.

The tools will be extracted into the folder you chose in the previous step:

For the next step, you will have to open a terminal window and change directory to the location you extracted the files to. Make sure you are inside the vmware-tools-distrib directory, and then run this command:

If you have a prior version of the VMware tools installed, you will see this message:

You will have to use sudo before the commands instead of the way they are listed in the error message, so run these two commands before re-running the vmware tools install script.

The installation of vmware tools should proceed smoothly at this point. It’s important after the installation is done to run the following commands:

sudo ./vmware-tools.pl

At this point, everything should be back up and running. You’ll probably want to reboot just to make sure everything is going to start back up smoothly.