Did you install VMWare Tools in the guest?

I did not install any of the external tools onto these hosts. From my earlier experiences with virtual tool installations these extras do consist of enhanced drivers but I found they were typically video drivers, mouse drivers, file system interfaces and sometimes integration for copy ‘n paste and drag ’n drop. I can understand how the video driver helps as it allows for capturing enhancements and passing them through to the underlying driver layer (critical for memory mapping, etc.) Now that takes a burden off the CPU because it doesn’t have to emulate VGA – but these installations all had every package removed from Fedora that had nothing to do with our implementation.

So it was an intentional choice not to install them because for our purpose, there shouldn’t be anything a driver could help with. After all, the memory manager (both physical and paging) and scheduler are core components of the kernel.