I recently setup an OpenMediaVault VM after finding that both FreeNAS and OpenFiler weren’t up to this specific job. VMware tools installation was pretty easy – OMV uses Debian so it’s just a matter of apt-getting the requisite packages:

#> uname -a
Linux archos 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Oct 3 03:59:20 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux
#> apt-cache search headers | grep 2.6.32-5
linux-headers-2.6.32-5-all-amd64 – All header files for Linux 2.6.32 (meta-package)
…
#> apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.32-5-all-amd64

The interesting part was the fact that VMware tools (i.e. vmware-tools-config.pl) refused to use the gcc included in the build-essential meta package. The kernel headers package included (or rather recommended) gcc 4.3, which VMware tools had no issue with.