Jack,
In my case, Ethernet performance was only part of the equation. Even at that, after dozens of attempts while working with the VMWare engineer, we could only somewhat improve Ethernet performance to where it averaged about 60% that of a dedicated host. I too have an Intel dedicated Ethernet card with 4 ports and we also enabled Jumbo frames.
For many things, a VM solution is the only way to go. Backups, image portability etc, is critical in some environments. In my case for "personal computing needs", VM solutions are not adequate. I was a user of Oracle VirtualBox for nearly 10 years and faced the same issues. I decided to try VMWare and discovered the grass was not greener on the other side of the fence.
As a semi-retired engineering consultant, I run CAD/CAM programs that do finite element analysis. Even if I dedicated all the system resources to a single VM, any given simulation would run at least 50% slower under a VM environment. As a hobby, I do audio and video processing. The software simulation of OpenGL sets the performance of a modern video card back a couple decades. USB 3.0 simply does not work -so, it's not even possible to use a microphone DAC to do live recording.
Companies who purchase VMWare certified hardware solutions will get the most benefit from a VMWare solution. VMWare Desktop Workstation is sold as a general platform package with minimal hardware restrictions. In my case, I have an AMD 3950 with a high-end MOBO and decent graphics card. VMWare installed properly and indeed provided virtualization capabilities; however, each virtual machine was little more than a glorified e-machine that had lots of hiccups, delays and glitches.
Once again, VMs are great for commercial web-server and database purposes. -For use as a high-end workstation, VMs are not the right tool.
Regards
Ray
