The autoconnect string that you see is generated when a USB device is connected to the device and the VM is shutdown. Next time the VM powers up it will attempt to reconnect the device on this USB port path.
The path refers to the USB port connect path. You can see this in a lsusb -t output by working down from bus/port/device through the tree output.
There are other ways to have autoconnect instead of using path but by vendor ID/product ID.
You should also be able to see both the USB port path and VID:PID in the vmware.log of the VM when the iPhone (or of any USB device) was plugged in while the VM was powering up.