Here an interesting project just found in the Net:
VMware Workstation can redirect a bidirectional serial port to a named pipe of Windows NT/2000/XP. But currently I do not know of any terminal program which can connect to a named pipe (is it time to write one???). So the easiest way was to implement a gateway, redirecting the named pipe to a tcp port and vice versa. The result is a tiny server which can run as an NT service. Currently, it only allows a single tcp connection and supports only one fixed pipe name.
It’s very old and I dunno if it still works with actual VMware products.