It's really a cute implementation of the IPCop Firewall.
A little proposal to author: the virtual disk size of 8 GB is overdone. The size should be 2 GB max.
If you setup it in the server environment you are probably using the fixed size disks.
It's just my IMHO 
The implementation of VMWare Tools is really excellent!
Ipcop is already installed as a vm guest. But I've installed another linux distribution under vmware server and I've notice that the web interface is a bit faster than without wmwaretools installed. Moreover You can also manage backup of your .vmx with a vbscript as soon as the vmwaretools are installed on the guest (with heardbeat function).
PS: However, vmware.com propose a version with vmwaretools inside (see http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/391) and without (see http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/292). It would be better with, no? 
Ultimately, which ever way gets you better performace (with tools or without) then that's what you use. For IPCop, it would be webinterface and NIC thoughput. I'm not sure what the tools would inprove with the web interface except by way of inproving NIC throughput. I don't have any numbers so I really couldn't say which is better for IPCop; with or without.
Interesting that there's two listings for IPCOP. I never noticed that before. So you could download both versions and try them both to see which gives better performace.
But, in perspective, the last time I had IPCop in full production was at a small office with less than 50 employees. I ran IPCop on a spare 433MHz Celeron. No speed demon there. But I had several of these boxes so I made them into firewalls for several remote offices. So I was not really measuring performace. It was a way of getting around the budget limitations. The accountant always like free.