Since VMware Workstation 14 (perhaps earlier) there have been performance problems when running a VM with an SSD virtual disk where the vdisk performance is much lower than what the SSD is capable of

Host system

OS: Windows 10 Pro 2004

RAM: 32GB DDR3

CPU: AMD FX 8350 @ 4.12GHz (8 cores)

Storage: 2TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD

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Virtualisation platforms

VMware Workstation 16 Pro

Windows 10 Hyper-V

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Guest OS specs on both platforms

CPU: 4 cores

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 64GB NVMe class thick provision (also tried SCSI for marginally better results on Workstation)

OS: Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia

Note: VMware tools was installed in the guest OS

Note: The tests were run with only one virtualisation platform being installed at a time so no co-existence causing any conflicts.

Note: On Hyper-V I had not got around to uninstalling VMware Tools and installing Hyper-V equivalent and the VM had been converted using the Starwind V2V Converter

I’ve had poor SSD performance on Workstation 14, 15 and now 16 with these huge I/O stalls.

The average read speed seems comparable to Hyper-V, but those dips are realtime and make the benchmark test take measurably longer than when run in Hyper-V.

VMware Workstation 16 Pro

Windows 10 Pro Hyper-V