Terrible I/O performance in VMware workstation

[spamik]

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?

[richard6121]

I've never run this combination but I'll take stab at this.  On the host system, under Device Manager, what is the IDE controller type and the driver being used?

[muddin]

Have you copied this VM from other machine?

[continuum]

support for physical disk has been better in earlier versions IMHO ...
anyway - feel free to use the physical disks as SCSI devices inside the VM - just rewrite the vmx-file while the VM is powered off

[spamik]

Finally I have succeded with rewrite my disks as SCSI according to this post: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/176521?start=0&tstart=0 and then change driver to pvscsi. But two points:

- without pvscsi driver is virtual machine completely useless - when attempt  to do some I/O intensive operation, whole VM hangs

- VMware on my system recognized my controller as IDE although it is SATA in AHCI mode (screenshot of drivers included).

VM was not copied - it was created as new and then I attached physical disks on which were running Linux system directly on host (previously).

[continuum]

> - VMware on my system recognized my controller as IDE although it is SATA in AHCI mode (screenshot of drivers included).
Thats normal - physical disks will be attached to a VM as SCSI if they are connected to a SCSI-controller or USB-controller. In every other case they will be added as IDE

[continuum]

FYI - using physical disks as SATA seems to be possible