For some reason, VMWare decided to blacklist some graphics drivers for their VMware Workstation Player. That includes the Mesa DRI drivers for most Intel IGPs, which results in unbearably slow graphic performance and potentially error messages such as “Hardware graphics acceleration is not available” or “No 3D support is available from the host” when starting a virtual machine

VMWare Workstation Player showing error message due to blacklisted driver

To enable hardware 3D acceleration for blacklisted drivers, the option mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers needs to be enabled:

...
mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = TRUE

This can either be done globally in /etc/vmware/config, on a per-user basis in ~/.vmware/preferences or for each individual VM in the corresponding .vmx file.