Michael,
I hope all is well. I am not sure if I understand your question correctly, so please advise me if the information that I am providing makes sense after you take a look, and we can clarify as needed.
Because your VM's tools are "Guest Managed", that means that they cannot be updated or upgraded via vCenter (vSphere Web Client or vSphere client) or directly via the vSphere Host Client.
Instead, you use OSP''s to manage and update the tools natively from within the Linux Guest O/S directly leveraging whatever update mechanism is supported natively.
If you are not familiar with OSPs, check out the link below to see what versions are available/supported:
https://www.vmware.com/support/packages.html
VMware provides OSPs for older operating systems. For newer operating systems, the vendor or community provides open-vm-tools as part of the operating system, and VMware recommends that you use the open-vm-tools that come with these operating systems. VMware does not provide OSPs for operating system for which open-vm-tools are available. To learn more about open-vm-tools, see the following:
https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools
This article "VMware support for open-vm-tools (2073803)" has some good summary info on the open-vm-tools, maily the same info to be found on the GitHub Repo that I point you to above, but almost at the very bottom of the article is a blurb about the release schedule for open-vm-tools and being able to subscribe to the list for release announcements, which I would advise you do if you want to stay current.
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2073803
I hope that helps to answer the question, but if not, please be in touch as needed and I can adjust to help you as needed in a more specific way.
Good Luck !!!
Cheers,
Adam
