Jei, when you connect your BeagleBone Black to your host PC, it mounts its /boot partition in your host OS (at least is does under Linux). As your host OS is Windows and you are running Linux in a Virtual Machine, you need to import this mounted /boot partition from the Windows OS, through the Virtual Machine software to your virtual Linux OS. I can't help you with this as I'm not familiar with VMWare's settings.
Best regards,
Miroslav
