It’s nice to use Guest Customization feature in VMware vCloud Director 5.1. Some operations like IP assignment to VM’s created by template is much easier if Guest Customization is supported in the OS of virtual machine. Not all the OS’s support this feature. For a complete list of supported OS’s, see here.
Apparently, you need to install VMware-Tools on the base VM (to be used as template in vCloud Director). For a Linux machine, two important things should be considered:

• For VMware Tools to be installed automatically, you need X Server. So, if you are working in text mode, you have to do it manually. VMware Tools is mounted on cdrom and then you should issue ‘vmware-install.pl’
• Never use VMware Tools packages provided by specific Linux distribution. Install by mounting VMware Tools in vCenter.