Thanks for all the help. Sorry that I haven't accessed this thread in a while but I have been able to take some time to come up with what I think is a suitable solution, considering.
What I wanted was a solution similar to vmware-server, which isn't currently available for OS X. So, I cobbled together the recommendations offered here.
Fusion requires a user to be logged in to launch the machines. Afterwords you can kill the gui and the machine continues to run in the background. This is workable, but if your machine hangs up for some reason, there is no console or means of reattaching to the backgrounded machine (that I know of). This didn't seem acceptable, so a user dedicated to running the machines as background processes that could remain logged in at the console was required. This was a security risk I wasn't satisfied with, so, using the command offered in some of the threads listed above, it is possible to return to the login screen if fast user switching is enabled:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend
Another thread suggested having a login script launch the machines and then use this command to log the user out. But this meant you couldn't really use this user since every time you logged in as this user, it launched the machines again and logged you out. This eliminated the usefulness of having a "console user". The answer was to have the machines launched at boot and then return to the log in screen. In this way users can administrate the server or log in as a console user and administrate guest machines. This is my start up script, which checks until the vmmanager user is logged in (5 times) and then launches all the machines in a specific directory and returns to the log in screen. Note one caveat: your virtual machines cannot have spaces in their names. I've also used these tags in hopes of a suspend upon shutdown, but it doesn't seem fully successful. Its not a perfect solution, but it works. Comments appreciated. Feel free to use at your own risk; support not supplied.
signal.suspendOnHUP = "TRUE"
signal.powerOffOnTERM = "TRUE"
Before you consider using reading this documentation on how startup scripts work on OS X:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Articles/StartupItems.html
#!/bin/sh
. /etc/rc.common
StartService () {
ConsoleMessage "VM-Manager: Starting"
for ((count=0; count<6; count+=1)); do
if ( who | grep -qE '^vmmanager.*console'); then
ConsoleMessage "VM-Manager: Starting VMWare Machines"
for machine in /Users/Shared/VirtualMachines/*vmwarevm; do
ConsoleMessage "VM-Manager: Starting $machine"
sudo -u vmmanager -H open $machine
done
/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend
break
else
sleep 5
fi
done
}
StopService () {
ConsoleMessage "VM-Manager: Suspending machines"
killall -HUP vmware-vmx
}
RunService "$1"
