Improve performance of VMWare

For a while I am using VMware environments for SharePoint development projects. Last time, I was really struggling with performance issues. My host OS is Windows 7 (64-bit) with an Intel T7700 processor and 4 GB RAM. About every 10 minutes, the CPU of the virtual machine (Windows 2008 R2, 64-bit) was up to 100% caused by a variety of services (every time another one).

There are some improvements I have made which worked (at least) in my situation.

• Configuration of the virus scanner.
  Exclude the VMware files from real-time protection and for the ThreatSense-engine
• Add some parameters to the VMware configuration file (.vmx)
  - Disable page sharing (improves I/O). Add following line to the vmx-file:
  sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
  - If you have enough free RAM for all planned concurrent VMs, be sure to disable memory trimming for guest OSes adding the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:
  memTrimRate="0"
• A really performance hitter for virtual machines is a fragmented host OS disk. Be sure to schedule a disk defragmentation on your host OS a regular basis (best: daily)
• See more tips here.

By now, I am a bit more happy