FreeBSD: how can I make “top” not cut off commands

To be honest, I would use Monit for this. It's available from RPMForge via yum for your particular version of Linux.

Monit is a tool for monitoring processes and daemons. Usually this is done via PID, but you can also match on a process string. Since VMWare Server process strings end in a "vm_name.vmx" specification, you can set Monit to check against that string. The only example of a VMWare Server 1.0.x system I have handy has ONE VM running, but as long as you know the names of the *.vmx files, you can list them independently in the monit config file.

Here's the output of monit procmatch vmx:

[root@abc ~]# monit procmatch vmx
List of processes matching pattern "vmx":
------------------------------------------
        /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -# product=2;name=VMware Server;version=2.0.1;buildnumber=156745;licensename=VMware GSX Server for Linux;licenseversion=3.0 build-156745; -@ pipe=/tmp/vmhsdaemon-0/vmx226abb1efa53200b;readyEvent=52 /vmware/abc_Web/abc_Web.vmx
------------------------------------------
Total matches: 1

Adding a small VMWare check entry to the monit config file (create and entry for each unique VM you need to monitor)...

check process vmware
        matching "vmware-vmx"

This shows the status of what's being monitored.

[root@abc ~]# monit status

Process 'vmware-vmx'
  status                            running
  monitoring status                 monitored
  pid                               25171
  parent pid                        1
  uptime                            992d 8h 5m 
  children                          0
  memory kilobytes                  1107796
  memory kilobytes total            1107796
  memory percent                    18.1%
  memory percent total              18.1%
  cpu percent                       0.0%
  cpu percent total                 0.0%
  data collected                    Thu Apr 26 04:49:12 2012

Then, there's a web interface to control processes at http://servername:2812

A bit further in the top man page there is:

   If  a  process is in the "SLEEP" or "LOCK" state, the state column will
   report the name of the event or lock on which the process  is  waiting.
   Lock  names  are  prefixed  with an asterisk "*" while sleep events are
   not

So basically, all the non-capital "STATE", non prefixed with an asterisk are sleep events name.

These label are set in FreeBSD kernel, so this is where you should go to find their meaning. Sadly there is no nice summary as the event name is set by the sleep calls.

For instance, somewhere in /usr/src/sys/kern/sys_pipe.c in the pipe_read function:

error = msleep(rpipe, PIPE_MTX(rpipe), PRIBIO | PCATCH, "piperd", 0);

Or in /usr/src/sys/kern/sys_pipe.c in the kern_nanosleep function:

error = tsleep(&nanowait, PWAIT | PCATCH, "nanslp", tvtohz(&tv));