So I’ve been battling getting VMWare running on CentOS and Ubuntu for the past 2 weeks (and the rest).
Last week enough was enough, I’d spent too much time trying to get the modules re-compiled and working with some sort of stability. In that amount of time I could have paid for the Windows license in the wasted time I’d spent trying to get it working. I’d followed all the guides to the letter, and trying following them with some imagination, but nothing seemed to work

I’m now running Server 2008 R2 Core as the VMWare host, it runs a slightly higher load than Linux, but with most services not installed as a default it’s much better than your average Server installation.

So if you’ve spent more than your fair share of time on VMWare, just take the bullet and go for a Windows VMWare host.

I can’t say it has much better performance or, I no benchmarks to prove it, but it does *just work*.