I think thats enough google bait in the title.
Using VMWare 8.x on El Capitan (OSX 10.11) with Windows 10 can be quite slow - this is a known (and un-addressed issue) with VMWare Fusion 8.x - and worse, VMWare have down-scaled their team, so it's unlikely to be properly fixed.
After a bit of googling, here's some things you can do to make it a bit quicker. Your VM will need to be shut down for this, and for the VMX changes, you will need to quit VMWare.
-
First, turn off 3D acceleration in VMWare settings (Virtual Machine → Settings → Display → Untick Accelerate 3D Graphics). (I'm not 100% convinced about this one yet, I'll try it in both states)
-
Next make the following changes to your VMX file. The file in contained inside the
vmwarevm
file (egWindows 10 x64.vmwarevm
), so right click on it, selectShow Package Contents
, and editWindows 10 x64.vmx
with any text editor.
mainMem.backing = "swap"
scsi0:0.virtualSSD = 1
MemTrimRate = "0"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
logging = "FALSE"
-
There is an explanation of these here.
-
If you have more than one disk, add another
scsiN:0.virtualSSD
line as needed (the CD drive doesn't need it)
Then start up your machine and see if it makes a difference.
The extended mitigation is to get Parallels, which appears not to have the same problem.