I have on my PC installed Windows 7 as a host and VMware workstation 9. I'm running in vmware linux guest which was previously installed directly on hard drive. This VM has 3 mapped physical disks - two entire 2TB drives and two partitions from 3rd SSD drive (where on first partition is Windows host). Problem is that when I do some I/O intensive operation in Linux guest it's do terrible things. Speed of reading/writing seems OK but after several seconds of this intensive operation whole system freezes for several tens of seconds. I can't move mouse in X in Linux guest. But still I can switch to the host system without problem. Also when this system is booting I can see that loading Linux kernel takes quite long time. I've saw similar symptoms when I booted this vm from live cd so it's not probably only sum kernel/etc bug in this system. Now in guest I'm running RAID rebuilt and system is completely useless...
Is there any way how can I speedup vm using raw disks? According to configuration vmware is exporting it as IDE drives although it's 6Gb/s SATA. Is there any way how to use some paravirtualized driver for these drives?