I've been testing the experimental support for efi firmware in Workstation 7 on both WIndows and Linux hosts. From my extensive experiments I have concluded that booting from DVDs with an efi El Torito entry is broken. And -- no -- I am not a hacker trying to install OS X on a PC. I am trying to install Windows 2008 R2 x64 via both an image downloaded from Technet and via a retail DVD and I can't get either one to boot.
Even attempting to boot via entering the efi shell and then manually booting via an efi booter or via the "boot manaher" menu is fruitless. It's not even possible to browse to a file on a Windows DVD or existing harddrive. This is because there is no FAT or UDF driver implemented in VMware's firmware. Interestingly enough there is a HFS+ driver which makes VMware's implementation of efi a sort of clone of Apple's efi e.g. one that does not follow uefi specs. El Torito booting support is obviously crippled as well as the virtual efi bios can't boot from the efi entry on the Windows DVD or the plain-jane bios entry.
Since there is no FAT driver built-in it's also impossible to load a UDF driver from the EFI or "ESP" FAT32 partition on disk. I suppose I could always format the "ESP" partiton to HFS+ and load from there but what's the point? It's dissapointing that VMware has chosen to make this feature "Apple only" for now as it would be useful in testing Windows rollouts on efi firmware. Every day VirtualBox is looking better and better and cheaper and cheaper in comparison...
Just my two bits.
