Anyway, I can't boot this on a Mac, the company is happy for me to run it in a VM sandbox. How can I boot this in VMWare Fusion? I can't see an option to boot from a USB flash drive, or indeed a USB drive of any kind, although I can assign the USB device to the VM. I made a .dmg of this flash key using Disk Utility (at device level, not partition level) but it won't boot from that either if I attach it to the CDROM.
VMware's BIOS doesn't support booting off of USB devices. There are a number of ways around this including a virtual bootable floppy that transfers control to the USB drive. For your situation, ideally you would make a bootable CD ISO of your USB fob that boot off of that. I'm a bit rusty on using mkisofs to create a bootable iSO but you had the USB fob as an ISO, you would use any Linux VM and choose the boot source as the ISO in Virtual Machine > Settings > Advanced > Startup Device.
Or you could make a device level block transfer of your USB drive to a VMware virtual disk (vmdk) like you did on the OS X side. For this you would shutdown your VM, and add a new blank, secondary virtual disk large enough to contain the USB drive contents (4, 8, 16 GB..) under Virtual Machine > Settings > + > Add hard disk.... Boot your Linux VM (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora), and use dd to block transfer from your USB device to your virtual disk. Once you have your USB captured as a virtual disk, shutdown the VM and remove the drive with your bootable USB content in Virtual Machine > Settings > Hard Disk > -, if Fusion asks, do not move the drive to the trash (even though that's a convenient way to locate it). Next make a new VM using the new machine wizard, add your bootable virtual disk as the primary boot device and you'll have a VPN VM.
