This is clearly a false positive and its firing on the return code of the client. In my opinion, the wrong thing to do would be to disable the rule entirely.
the right thing to do is to re-write the snort rule and exclude "220 VMware" as content from the rule.
To do this, open up /etc/snort/rules/emerging-malware.rules (or emerging_pro-malware.rules if you have the subscription) and insert content:!"220 VMware"; right before content:"220 "
reload snort via sudo service snort restart and that should make the false positives go away.