I run Linux as my desktop OS at work, but there are some times when I need to use Windows. I was using KVM, but I had enough problems with it that I gave up and tried using VMware instead. I was pleasantly surprised to see that VMware Player now supports installing my own OS, not just playing existing images.

However, I quickly discovered that performance was miserable with it. My hard drive was constantly grinding away, and my host OS iowait would hover around 15% and frequently be much higher, at least as much as 50%. After some searching about, I discovered that, for some inexplicable reason, VMware keeps an mmap()'d disk-based backing store of the guest machine's RAM, and keeps it as an unlinked file in /tmp. Since RAM changes pretty frequently, it's constantly slamming my hard drive trying to write RAM data in near-real-time. I also discovered that there's no way to turn this backing store off.

I've also found that VMware Workstation, at least the 30-day trial, has the exact same symptom.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to fix this absurd brokenness of VMware, or should I just try something else instead? I've generally been pretty pleased with VMware in the past, but this one has my confidence very severely swayed.