VMware Server 2.0 - Tuning

I made the following enhancements in an attempt to improve my VMware performance on a Debian 2.6.26-1-686-bigmem. 

Edit VMware configuration file and add the following:

vi /etc/vmware/config

mainMem.useNamedFile tells VMWare where to put it's temporary workspace file. This file contains the content of the Virtual Machine memory which is not used. By default it is placed in the directory with the virtual machine, however that can seriously impact performance so we'll turn it off.
mainMem.useNamedFile = FALSE

tmpDirectory is the default path for any temp files. We need to change that to be a shared memory filesystem (in RAM).
tmpDirectory="/dev/shm"

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize and prefvmx.minVmMemPct tell VMWare to either use a fixed sized memory chunk or balloon and shrink memory as needed. With 4GB of memory we'll use a fixed size of memory to reduce disk IO.

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize="TRUE"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct="100"

Be sure to install VMware tools followed by:

Set the time in the Virtual Machine to the hosts time.

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"

Force gracefully stop on each VM.

autostop = "softpoweroff"

I don't care about collapsing memory into a shared pool, this tells the VM to not share which saves CPU cycles:

mem.ShareScanTotal=0
mem.ShareScanVM=0
mem.ShareScanThreshold=4096
sched.mem.maxmemctl=0
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

This basically performs the same action as the configuration I put in /etc/vmware/config by telling the VM to eliminate the temp files and not to balooning and shrink memory, however it doesn't hurt anything to have it in both locations:

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
MemTrimRate = "0"
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"

In order for the VMWare configuration to work properly with shared memory, you'll need to increase the default shared memory size for tmpfs to match the amount of memory in your system. This can be done by editing /etc/default/tmpfs:

SHM_SIZE=4096