A quick jog into the 'help' menu item, and searching mildly, yielded more information about the VMware tools... From my understanding of the VMware Tools, it ties into the virtual hardware of the VM. Meaning that without said tools, you won't have the 'bare metal' management of the VM that you would with the tools installed/running. That is on top of providing better drivers/support for the virtual hardware than without the tools.
Since you're running off the reservation with your combination of VM OS and set of tools, there's not a lot that can be done from this side of things. I would suggest checking with the people who created the tools you installed to see if they have a patch, fix, or line of code you can insert to gain the additional functionality you're looking for.
Otherwise, the best you can probably hope for is to set up alerts (email notifications) for when the VM goes down, and doesn't come back online within X minutes. This way you at least know the VM is not starting up and can address that issue more rapidly.
