How to Increasing Performance of VMWARE

To increase performance on your virtual machines, there are several things you can do. The first thing you should always do is install the VMware tools on every virtual machine. The VMware tools contain drivers that are designed to increase virtual machine performance.
Next you can defragment your virtual drives regularly just as you would with a physical drive. You can also increase performance by scheduling antivirus and backup programs to run during off-peak hours when use is low, and turning off screen savers.
To further increase performance, VMware advises that you disable unused resources to free system resources. Items that you should evaluate and disable if not used include:

• COM port 1
• COM port 2
• LPT port 1
• Floppy drive
• CD-ROM Auto-Detect
• USB adapters

Disabling these devices will free up IRQ resources and eliminate IRQ sharing conflicts within the guest operation system that can cause performance problems. Remember, you should enable devices only when you need them.