I've installed FreeBSD many times in vmware workstation. I haven't ever used vmware in Windows though (only on Linux hosts) but it should be the very same with regard to running a guest OS.
FreeBSD 7 should work well in Vmware. I tried a 7-CURRENT several months ago in vmware first before installing it for real.
Certainly you will be able to "get it online" that way, if your NIC is working in the host OS. Bridged networking is the best, because then your virtual machines will act like like real machines as far as networking is concerned (i.e. your virtual machine will have it's own IP address).
If you're going to install it in Vmware, I would just recommend using virtual disks rather than raw disks (as you are alluding to by saying you want to "boot the freebsd partition"). With virtual disks, when you create your virtual machine you just create your disks of the desired size, and they are files that reside on your native filesystem. This is the normal way of doing things.
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