This has bothered me for a while: I start vmware to run some OS I need to port code to, and my X11 server crashes for some reason (Ok, I use Beryl...), taking down the virtual machine with it. I did some searches, and it turns out there's an option for this in vmware! I guess I should have read the documentation, but who does that?

After starting up vmware, go to Preferences, and in the Workspace tab, enable the setting for Run powered on virtual machines in background after close. Now, just close vmware after the VM is running, and it stays running in the background. You might also want to enable the VNC server for the VM(s), so that you can connect to the console if need be (but you can also reconnect it to the vmware console again by just starting up vmware again).

Oh, this is only tested on the VMware 6 (beta), I don't know if this is available in older version.