Let me see if I understand. The VM has a virtual disk and also access to two raw disks. Nothing else has access to those raw disks, they're not mounted by the host OS. So what you're telling me is, with that scheme, I should never suspend the VM, the only safe thing to do is to power it on/power it off? So if I reboot the host I need to first power down the VM? Inconvenient, I guess, but certainly not impossible.
I'll see if I can copy the existing VM off somewhere safe, remove the raw drives, reboot, and add them back in.
EDIT: although of course, since the machine is powered on it's no trivial task to just remove the drives, VMware player doesn't allow that. Maybe I need to edit the VMX file?