Difficulty installing VMWare Tools on RHEL 6.9

Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this issue as I just got off the phone with VMWare Support and they are thinking that something has changed with Red Hat, RHEL6 and/or the kernel which is causing issues on how we install VMWare Tools.

I have a RHEL 6.9 x86_64 VM and I just installed a new kernel:

[cmmiller@hostname ~]$ uname -a
Linux (FQDN removed) 2.6.32-696.20.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 12 15:07:59 EST 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[cmmiller@hostname ~]$

Any time this happens, I uninstall VMWare Tools and re-install VMWare Tools, make sure to select the option with the kernel, and all is well.

However this time when following the same steps, from vCenter, I'm getting either an error message from the Summary Tab under that RHEL Guest. Either getting "VMWare Tools is not installed" or "VMWare Tools is not running."

I'm falling back to a snapshot to fix this, however I also tried to not remove VMWare Tools after upgrading to this kernel and VMWare Tools continued to run with no issues, even after rebooting and booting into a new kernel.

I'm also having issues where I go to install VMWare Tools from our ESXi servers and same issue. However if I grab VMWare Tools from VMWare's website, which maybe a few versions ahead, then it installs with no issues.

For the heck of it, I noticed that Red Hat has packages for open-vm-tools for RHEL v6.9. I may just go this route, however will this have any issues with VMWare vSphere 6.0.0? Will I still have the same functionality of using NIC drivers of vmxnet3? Or any others cons/pros that I may not have thought about?

thanks again