Hi Jason, and welcome to the VMware Communities!
The symptoms you describe indicate that the media you're installing from is possibly defective or incorrectly prepared. What's the source media you're using? Mount the media on the host, launch the host's Terminal and run diskutil list. The output of diskutil list should include something very similar to this one:
$ diskutil list /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ ESD/
/dev/disk3
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_partition_scheme *4.8 GB disk3
1: Apple_partition_map 30.7 KB disk3s1
2: Apple_HFS Mac OS X Install ESD 4.8 GB disk3s2
$
Cheers,
--
Darius