I have noticed ever since openSUSE 12.3 was released that GNOME desktop will not boot under VMWare, but the KDE desktop install will; If one sticks with version 12.2, then GNOME works flawlessly. I at first suspected that it was version 9.02 of VMWare, but after recently upgrading to version 10, the same issue exists. The betas for openSUSE 13.1 seem to be ok with a GNOME desktop, although not as good as Fedora 19. As a matter of fact, Fedora 19, which defaults to GNOME works perfectly with VMWare, while openSUSE 12.3 does not, when one selects the GNOME desktop. Ubuntu 13.04 is incredibly stable & well designed for use with VMWare, although one has to do more work to install vmware tools with Ubuntu, which is annoying. But if one installs openSUSE, the vmware tools install is less hassle, and usually it auto installs.
OpenSUSE 12.2 is a great operating system to use with VMWare, but it is soon to be 2 versions behind. Hopefully openSUSE 13.1 will be as stable and reliable as 12.2 has been.