encryption - Can I get VMWare Workstation to work with files on an encrypted external hard drive?

I have the following situation:

1. I needed to test some stuff with VMWare VM's.


2. My work desktop machine has a paltry 100GB hard drive which is already mostly full with other software (Office, Visual Studio, etc.)


3. I convince my boss to get me an external 2TB USB hard drive.


4. I create, configure, install and use VM's on the external hard drive without issue


5. My company decides to roll encryption software on everyone's machines which add encryption to removable storage (like my external hard drive)


6. While I can boot up my VM's with no issue, other operations - such as trying to revert to a snapshot result in a BSOD, which after I reboot I find the .vmx file has been destroyed/deleted.

OK, so clearly my former arrangement with VMWare will no longer work. However, the reason I was trying to do this from an external hard drive in the first place was because I don't have enough space on my desktop machine to work with VM's on any serious basis (and our internal IT staff states that our machines cannot facilitate an additional internal hard drive)

So I'm wondering if there's any way to run VM's from the now-encrypted external hard drive and keep as many of the big files as possible on the external drive. I'm not above hand-editing .vmx files or whatever I need, I just need to keep the bulk of the data on the external disk (preferably with the snapshot file structure intact).

Also for what it's worth I'm not 100% sure what the gig is with the encryption. It's GuardianEdge but I'm not sure if it's that the hard drive contents are encrypted, or if the communication with the hard drive is encrypted or what. The documentation makes it seem as if files placed on the external media are encrypted as they go, but this hard drive already had a ton of stuff on it, so I don't know.

To be clear I'm not trying to circumvent encryption or anything, I'm just wanting to be able to use and deal with VM's in a situation where my only internal hard drive is too small for the task, and the bulk of the files will be on an external drive, which is the arrangement I had that worked prior to this new encryption software.