I have a secure Linux appliance that I am trying to virtualize on VMware ESX Server. All interaction and configuration of the appliance is undertaken by connecting to the appliance's serial port. All virtual ttys have been commented out on the appliance's /etc/inittab but I have uncommented tty1 and can now login to a bash shell as root. I want to be able to redirect all appliance serial output and input on /dev/ttyS0 to tty2 on boot so that configuring the appliance at any time post boot would be as easy as ALT-F2. I've renamed /dev/ttyS0 and then created a symbolic link /dev/ttyS0 -> /dev/tty2. This works but is pretty gross I reckon so are there any other more elegant ways to get ttyS0 i/o onto tty2 ?

Do "ls -l /dev/tty2 /dev/ttyS0". Normally it would show something like:
crw------- 1 root root 4, 2 Jul 20 11:20 /dev/tty2
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 64 Jul 20 07:19 /dev/ttyS0

Since you've already made /dev/ttyS0 into a symlink it won't be.

The numbers for "device" files are major/minor rather than bytes as for other files.

So in the above 4 is the major for both /dev/tty2 and /dev/ttyS0. 2 is the minor for the former and 64 is the minor for the latter.

You can remove your symlink then use mknod to create a ttyS0 file with the same major/minor as tty2:

mknod /dev/ttyS0 c 4 2

All writes to and reads from /dev/ttyS0 will go to the same physical device as pointed to by /dev/tty2 because it is the major/minor rather than the name that determines the device.