I’ve got multiple VMs on a HDD RAID array. I/O is ok, but it’s platter style drives in RAID-1 – speed is constrained by the limitations of the drive design.

I also have a small SSD RAID array of only 80G that houses the base Windows O/S, it idea being that the base O/S should run as quick as possible. Obviously, with a Win10 install, I’ve only got a few GB to spare on that partition, so there’s no way I could move the VMs over.

Lightbulb: I could still increase VM performance many times over if I could have VmWare use the SSD array for *just* the virtual memory file.

Luckily, the VM config file has just an option for this:

workingdir = "c:\VmWareWorkingDir"

Now the VM disk images still live on the HDD array, but the virtual memory file now lives on the SSD array – with much faster I/O 😀