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In the ongoing effort to optimize the performance of VMWare guests on a Linux host particular attention should be paid to the physical disk arrangement and how VM's are arranged on them.

On a physical server for example you would always separate processes across different disks, for example swap/paging files, system and Data drives should always be on separate physical disks to prevent locking situations. In a virtual environment, whilst creating separate vmdk's, the tendency is to store all your virtual disks in the same folder (eg /var/vm) which in most cases also tends to be on a single platter.

By also separating the vmdk's across multiple physical disks there should be an improvement in disk performance.