Interesting question, and one I've been faced with a few times. I guess it depends on how the VMware replication is configured. Is it synchronous or asynchronous? There is a potential to lose data (in theory) if it's asynchronous and the host crashes right after a transaction is committed on the primary before the block is replicated to the secondary.

Personally, I'd prefer to have mirroring/always on as the DBA is in control of the failover. You then have other benefits too (rolling upgrades, piecemeal failovers etc.)

EDIT: Think I misunderstood the question: yes, if every VMDK/LUN (or whatever) is replicated at the SAN level, ie, the entire VM, it should come up in the DR site with the same services - it will appear to be a crashed server though (an so recovery will be required on the DBs).