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Is it possible to move a VMware Fusion 3.0 image to its own partition? Not with the intention of running it standalone (although that might be useful) but with the intention of speeding it up, as VMware Fusion 3.0 seems to be too slow to run Visual Studio on a MacBook Pro.

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…How would this speed it up. I don't fully understand what you are trying to do. Sure, you might be able to mount the Windows file system, but you still can't run the Windows apps on OS X without virtualisation (which you say is too slow) – David Pearce Dec 1 '09 at 11:51
FWIW, I used to run Visual Studio 2005 on my 15" Macbook Pro with 3GB of memory in VMWare Fusion 2 and never had any speed problems. Perhaps there's some other configuration issue going on here? I doubt moving to a raw partition is going to give a significant performance improvement. – Rudedog Dec 1 '09 at 17:23
@joshhunt if the partition for the virtual machine is also virtual, every time it has to write to disk it has to go through the OS file system, it's another step that slows things down. If it's in its own partition there's one less step and it should theoretically work as fast as any other native partition. – J. Pablo Fernández Dec 2 '09 at 6:42
@Rudedog I expected this to work just fine but it didn't. I don't know if I am expecting too much or there really is a problem. If there is, I wasn't able to find it. – J. Pablo Fernández Dec 2 '09 at 6:44
So, are you finding that writing the files is slow when inside the VM? – David Pearce Dec 2 '09 at 12:46
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It's fine to move the .vmware file to another partition so that all disk I/O for that VM is on the partition (or seperate disk) - it's just a matter of moving your VM file and then opening it up again in Fusion.

However if you want to put your VMWare image contents on it's own partition this is only supported (by Fusion) with a Boot Camp installation.

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Do you mean that VMWare doesn't support running a virtual machine with a native partition or that it just can't copy a virtual hard disk to a real partition? – J. Pablo Fernández Dec 2 '09 at 6:45
With the exception of Boot Camp VMWare Fusion doesn't support running a virtual machine with a native partition (as in the VM's contents are on a physical partition rather than within a VM's file) – Chealion Dec 2 '09 at 16:40
I thought that with Boot Camp it actually copies the content into an image. Does it do that? – J. Pablo Fernández Dec 5 '09 at 16:46
In VMWare Fusion 2 and 3 it never did. – Chealion Dec 5 '09 at 17:57
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