Since using OSX and VMWare Fusion I've been looking for ways to improve performance. Using my MBP with 4GB of RAM is not at all a bad thing ;-), but when developing in Visual Studio (especially 2008) under Windows (especially Vista) within a virtual machine, I did experience glitches in performance. Using Activity Monitor on OSX I figured out that, what was causing the glitches, was disk activity. The MBP sports a 7200rpm drive, but it still is the bottleneck.
Now for the tip: Use an external drive (the fastest one you can get, i use a LaCie 1TB 7200rpm USB2 drive) to store your VM's.
Running a VM from a different drive dramatically boosts performance of the VM, as OSX's drive intensive virtual memory management won't conflict with Windows'.
Currently i use the afore mentioned LaCie drive, but as it consists of 2 (noisy) 3.5" drives, I think I need to invest in (quite) a fast 1.8" or 2.5" external drive.
PS. Do upgrade to the latest version of VMWare fusion! Version 2.0.1 solves the often seen memory corruption and finally works well with Vista x64!
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