Thank you both.
Since Mac is so awesome about imaging, I think I'll use Carbon Copy Cloner to image to a new SCSI configured drive. For some reason I was getting hung up on the disk type in my head and didn't think about imaging earlier today!
I agree that there should be some warning. I wonder if this can be why my 2012 MBP slows to a crawl whenever I am using the VM. I know part of it is due to the 5400 RPM drive but I thought VMWare was better at splitting up the load.
chris 