Something for which I had a requirement today: -
If you've wanted to try out a bootable CD or USB flash drive in a virtual machine environment, you've probably noticed that VMWare's offerings make it difficult to change the boot device. We'll show you how to change these options.
In essence, the author talks one through adding a setting to the .VMX configuration file, which adds a delay to the boot of a VM, providing access to the BIOS screen and function keys.
Which is nice .....