Sorry, forgot to update you on this - I got this sorted out in my own thread.
The problem is kind of simple - since Ubuntu 18.04 Host (if we talk about LTS versions, only), NTFS does not work on a location of a VM-computer. 16.04 works fine.
So, you cannot use an ntfs-filesystems when running for you VMs. Otherwise the performance is horribly bad - never really got the VM all the way opened up because of the horrible performance.
When using the normal, current ext4, everything works fine. I'm not sure what the matter with VMware Player versions is, I only tried on 15.x and mainly 16.x versions - so only with the latest versions. I doubt VMware version makes any difference in this.
