Using VMWare's physical disk install option, we can install Windows directly to the hard disk instead of a virtual disk. This option is available only on VMWare Workstation and is not available on macOS. So we need a Windows machine. The documentation says this works on GNU/Linux systems also, but I did not try. When creating Windows virtual machine choose Physical disk and select the correct disk. This will erase all data on the hard disk. The wizard then completes which will also install VMWare Tools. We need to uninstall this before booting from this on a mac. It's a lot easier this way, else we need to manually uninstall VMWare Tools.

This will give the normal version of Windows instead of the portable Windows To Go mode which have issues related to hibernate.

Update on Sun, 26 May 24: I did not see hibernate restoring the state on reboot. I think hibernate will not work if Windows is running from an external hard disk.