How do I Correlate VMware Tools Version Numbers to a Corresponding ESX/ESXi Version?

A while back I posted a blog to answer the question “do I have to upgrade VMware Tools following an ESXi host upgrade?”. In that post I showed how you can use the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix to list the supported tools versions for a given ESXi release. Here’s a quick example showing the VMware Tools support available with ESXi 5.1 Update 1:

Notice that the interoperability matrix shows support based on the ESX/ESXi version that is providing the tools. This is different from how the virtual machines report their VMware Tools versions. The virtual machines lists their tools version as a four-digit number which has no correlation with the corresponding ESX/ESXi host version:

So how do you correlate the information provided by the interoperability matrix with the VMware Tools version as reported by the virtual machine? You can get that information from here: http://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions. This web page was recently updated to reflect the latest VMware Tools to ESXi host version mappings.