I tried to boot the vmdk generated by the Haiku build system here but it aborted. It seems the header has the capacity field set to 0, to mean that there is no embedded grain directory if I understand the vbox sources... At least the same image boots perfectly in VBox.
If anyone wants to test : http://haiku-files.org/vmware/ any image should do. They are generated by: http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/src/tools/vmdkimage/vmdkimage.cpp#L303 The mention in vbox: http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Storage/VMDK.cpp#L2796 I might have a closer look at some point but I don't know when. François.