Enable 256 colors in VMWare terminal

As part of my work I am creating a lot of virtual machines and often powering them down and starting back up. Since I work in QA, I often need to reset the virtual server to default configurations to ensure nothing is messed up for the next test. Because of this, using a tool like PuTTy to connect becomes annoying, as I constantly need to close and start it again when I stop the server (I know this is a ridiculous excuse, but hey). Additionally, I would simply like to be able to use the VMWare console for most of the quick work that I need to do.

I've also put some time into developing a dot file repository that includes a lot of changes to vim, particularly color changes. Unfortunately, while the configuration works great in PuTTy and native terminals (ie. an actual Linux machine running in a terminal) I have had no luck with VMWare.

No matter what I do, I cannot enable more than 8 colors in the VMWare terminal. Is this how it intentionally is? I can't find anything to support this and I see no reason why it should be so. How can I enable 256 colors?

Here are my files (albeit compressed):

.vimrc

set nocompatible
filetype off


set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
call vundle#begin()

" Let Vundle handle itself
Plugin 'VundleVim/Vundle.vim'

" Solarized theme from github.com
Plugin 'altercation/vim-colors-solarized'

" Git integration plugin from github.com
Plugin 'tpope/vim-fugitive'

" All plugins must be loaded before here!
call vundle#end()
filetype plugin indent on


" Enable tab syntax detection
" filetype plugin indent on


" Enable 256-colour mode
if $TERM == "xterm-256color"
set t_Co=256
endif

" Enable syntax highlighting
syntax enable

" Set the number of colours for solarized
let g:solarized_termcolors=256

" Use the dark background
set background=dark

" Use the solarized colour scheme
colorscheme solarized

.bashprofile

#I use screen instead of xterm because of screen issues within PuTTy
#export TERM="xterm-256color"
export TERM="screen-256color"

Does anyone know how to enable 256 color support inside the VMware terminal? All the questions I have looked at only deal with 256 color support within non-VMware terminals, and I haven't been able to find anything that fixes my need. Thanks!

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