Virtualizing FreeBSD...

[Mark Felder]

I don't know what happened to my long reply I was writing but somehow I
sent a partially written draft. Odd.

Look here for crazy crash info -- thread goes on for months with no
resolve. VMWare refused to acknowledge the bug.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2012-March/239694.html

As far as alignment goes -- every OS you use non-local block storage has
had step #1 "align your partitions/filesystems". That's been true for at
least 20 years; I'm not sure why people would think this is a new
development. The good news is that 9.x+ uses GPT by default so the hard
work is done for you.

If you're having success on VMWare count yourself lucky -- I had a lot
of people contact me off-list who couldn't publicly discuss this asking
me for help as well. I still occasionally get an email asking if I ever
fixed it.