I experienced this problem recently.

What I found was that reinstalling the VMware Tools helped. When it went to do that, it upgraded the KEXTs from VMware as well. So it was a couple of iterations of 1) make some update, 2) reboot the image in VMware, 3) if not done with upgrades, go back to step 1.

I am running VMware 12.1.2 right now, and Big Sur 11.6.1.

When re-installing the VMware tools, it mumbled something about updating the pre-boot volume. Before doing this update, restarting Big Sur would result in the boot process failing once then recovering. After this update, that problem appears to be resolved as well.