High IOWait on VMWare Server on Linux

In using VMWare Server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (CentOS 5) I discovered a rather difficult problem.  My setup includes Red Hat Linux 5.2, Solaris 10 and Windows Server 2003 guests running on a Red Hat 5.2 host server all 64bit except for Windows running on AMD Opteron multicore processors on an HP …