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I use VMWare Workstation and keep my virtual machines on a separate physical disk, not my boot drive. Does this mean that the VM's IO will be against that disk when it is running?

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Nice one, thanks for the super swift responses guys! – Sean Kearon Oct 13 '11 at 15:57
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Yes. All I/O in these virtual machines will be redirected by VMWare to the file that contains the virtual machine's disk. If that file is on secondary disk, then naturally all I/O will happen against that disk.

Note that this does not mean that I/O on the primary disk will not be impacted at all. Some I/O impact is system-wide (e.g. bus traffic, associated CPU-time, etc.)

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right, just what I meant, in a clearer manner – Sathya♦ Oct 13 '11 at 15:54
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Does this mean that the VM's IO will be against that disk when it is running?

A bulk of them will hit the disk dedicated to the VM, but your primary disk will still be accessed especially for swap access & MFT updates

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