Having a new workstation to prepare for use, Fedora 11was tested and chosen over CentOS 5.3 because of the cutting-edge hardware. VMware  Workstation 6.5 tends to install cleanly on CentOS, but not on the newer Fedora kernels. I needed to install the following packages to get Workstation to run:

1. gcc
2. libstdc++
3. kernel
4. kernel-devel
5. kernel-headers

These can be installed with a single yum command:

$ sudo yum install gcc libstdc++ kernel kernel-devel kernel-headers

At this point Workstation should find everything that it need to build its kernel modules.