Ah... okay yeah.  If you're using Xvnc or something, it normally launches a headless X server that doesn't have direct access to accelerated graphics.

Workstation is supposed to find the accelerated X server on your local console, and then connect to that for graphics while simultaneously connecting to the headless X server (that the UI is running on) for the console display.  That's apparently going wrong here...

If you post a vmware.log I can take a look and try to figure out what's going wrong, and hopefully either give you better advice or see if we can patch this for a future version of Workstation.

Otherwise, as far as immediate work-arounds, you can try either:

(1) Setting the config option: mks.x.displayStringFallback=":0"

(Or replace ":0" with whatever your accelerated X server DISPLAY string is.)

(2) If you launch the VM on the accelerated display, you can turn on "VNC Connections" and then access the VM on your VNC X server via a separate VNC client.

VM Settings => Options => VNC Connections => "Enable VNC Connections"

If you have trouble launching the VM on the other X server, you configure the VM this way in the UI on your VNC X server, and then quit the Workstation UI and manually launch the vmware-vmx process yourself with the correct DISPLAY variable.

DISPLAY=":0" /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx /path/to/vm.vmx