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.
I think 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.