Hey all, I have exhaustively researched this problem for a few weeks now. I am running out of ideas!
The server is a brand new quad core Xeon with 6 gb of ram running Windows 2003 Standard R2 64 bit as the host OS. It has an Intel Raid 1 for the operating system and an Adaptec Raid 1 for the vmware guest (both SATA). Vmware server 2.0.2
The disk controller cache is set to write-through for safety.
The guest is 32-bit Windows 2003 R2 with VMware Hardware version 7 and VMware tools installed. I've tried IDE and SCSI drive configurations.
The CPU's will spike to 100% on the guest os whenever I copy files. Reads are fine when copying over the network. It stays at 4-5% or less. Any time I do writes (even formatting the disk
inside the guest OS) it spikes until the writes are completed.
Old VMs which I have imported do not have this issue, but they are 2000 and XP.