Notes on OSX Virtalization, booting raw disks

I picked up a Mac to use for work, primarily, a couple weeks ago.  It's a late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 13" w/ 8GB ram and 256GB SSD.  I wanted to be able to dual boot with Linux for home and dev type stuff, but being short on time needing to encrypt my primary hdd, I didn't get to figure out boot camp before finalizing my setup for work, so I'm not about to mess with my primary disk's partition/efi config and risk downtime at work.

Sooo, I'm trying to get set up to boot to boot Linux on an SD card.  This has been a bumpy road.  I purchased a Nifty SD card adapter and a Sandisk 80MBps 64G card to install to, and I'm doing the install via a VM while I work on other stuff.  This presents first problem - support for booting SD card by Parallels, Fusion, or VirtualBox.

I'm defaulting to Parallels since everyone else on mac uses it at work, but Fusion looks pretty comparable.  I've used VirtualBox a lot in the past, but I got tired of bugs and crashing at some point and switched to VMWare workstation at home.

That said, VirtualBox seems to be the most flexible and capable when it comes to booting SD cards on Mac.  It is the only virtualization solution of the three that doesn't have  "dumbed down" interface for people who expect things to just work without understanding them on mac.  It comes with command line tools for creating virtual disk files, etc.  This is what you need if you want to make a "bootcamp" disk image to use with Fusion.

Parallels and Fusion only support booting raw disks via "bootcamp".  You can't just point them to a block device and have them use it without tricking them.

• To trick Fusion into booting to the SSD, set up a linux VM with a virtual disk that you'll replace.  Then use virtualbox command line tools to provision a raw disk vmdk and copy this over in place of the virtual disk that Fusion created.   That's it. It should boot fine. 
• To trick Parallels, and note that I haven't found a way to do a raw disk vmdk like with Fusion, create a VM without a disk and enable efi.  You may want to remove Network from the boot order.  In the VM settings menu, attach the SD card to the VM.  Power up your VM and wait for it to drop you to the efi shell.  Then run:
• fs0:
• cd EFI\ubuntu
• grubx64.efi

Getting the macbook to boot the SSD is another matter, and it's where I'll look at the actual Ubuntu build.