Use this command to verify (top one works in Red Hat 4):
for a in /sys/class/scsi_device/*/device/timeout; do echo -n “$a “; cat “$a” ; done;
or
for a in /sys/class/scsi_generic/*/device/timeout; do echo -n “$a “; cat “$a” ; done;
You should see results of 180

I was able to change the Red Hat line in 99-vmware-scsi-udev.rules to be:
# Redhat systems
ACTION==”add”, BUS==”scsi”, SYSFS{vendor}==”VMware” , SYSFS{model}==”Virtual disk”, RUN+=”/bin/sh -c ‘echo 180 >/sys$DEVPATH/device/timeout’”
No trailing spaces allowed for vendor or model and it is case sensitive.
And now it works for us with Debian/Suse commented out. Your mileage may vary, always reboot and test.

Apparently, even if you are running Red Hat and didn’t touch the /etc/udev/rules.d/99-vmware-scsi-udev.rules file, that 180 would get set properly through one of the other rules still matching somehow. This problem only effects those of us that commented out the other lines to eliminate that boot screen error.
Yes, if you ignore the boot messages you are fine, but this is still a bug. VMware is pattern matching on Debian or Suse for a Red Hat machine, that is just wrong (poor coding/testing). Of course a future update of vmware-tools will probably overwrite my changes to 99-vmware-scsi-udev.rules so I need to monitor that and also ask them to fix their script.