So, the moral of the story is .....
Hang on, what was the problem ?
I tried, and failed - for several hours - to work out the precise combination to get VMware Workstation 9.0.0 working on OpenSuSE 13.1.
Long story short, VMware was failing to find the right Linux kernel headers, despite my having installed the supposedly missing pre-requisites, including Linux kernel headers, gcc, make etc.
I spent ages Googling and trying various different sources, including: -
etc.
The latter was useful, in terms of providing a whole slew of different VMware patches, none of which were for the precise combination of Linux kernel ( 3.11 ) and VMware ( 9.0.0 ).
The solution ?
Go to VMware Workstation 10.0.3 ( specifically this binary VMware-Workstation-Full-10.0.3-1895310.x86_64.bundle ).
Once I did this, it just worked out of the box.
Now I'm off to build a Windows 2008 server in order to get Active Directory working ... this in order to allow me to test Single Sign-On (SSO) between AD and WebSphere Application Server 8.5.