That depends on how the dongles are implemented.

Dongles that requires direct memory access (MS-DOS, Win98 and similar) or requires a special Windows driver are normally dead-in-the water with a virtual machine. Dongles that does consume a port but instead manages to behave "normally" should have a good chance to work.

It's the "our dongle is fully transparent" part that tends to break all support. But since VMware Player can be downloaded for free, it's very meaningful to test what can - and what can't - be run on a virtualized machine.