I just installed the VMWare vSphere Command Line Interface on Debian and had a headache because it kept reporting missing packages and RPM errors. BAsically the script looks for a file /etc/*-release and uses this to determine what type of system it is installing on. Since Debian does not have this file it falls back to assuming a RedHat based system and uses RPM to check for required dependencies. Not suprisingly this fails.
The quickest way to get round this is to pretend the system is ubuntu and install, then delete the ubuntu file:
# echo ubuntu > /etc/temp-release
Install using ./vmware-install script
# rm /etc/temp-release
The dependencies I had to install were libssl-dev and perldoc
