Hi,
I'm running VMware Server Beta 2 on two dual core Xeon processors. Host system is Debian Linux. Guest system is also Debian and have vmware tools installed. Performance of console is horrible. `ls -lR /` is "forever" task. I interrupted it after 20min 
When login to same host by ssh than it is reasonably responsive.
I don't understand it much since Windows console is working pretty fast on same host.
Maybe it might help if I compile Guest system with framebufer console?