VMware is slow or hangs on Ubuntu when running virtual machines from NTFS partitions

I have an external hard drive (WD My Passport, highly recommended!) where I keep all my virtual machines and use it with my desktop (Windows 7) and laptop (Ubuntu 8.10). When I use Ubuntu as host, WMware hangs when starting virtual machines stored on my external HD (NTFS partition). If I copy these VMs to the host ext3 partition, then VMware works fine.

In order to run virtual machines stored on a NTFS partition by using VMware on a Linux host, you will need to add the following entry to your configuration file (.vmx file):

mainMem.useNamedFile="FALSE"

This entry will disable paging files and VMware will work fine, often with a much better performance. For more details, see here. After I added this entry to my .vmx files, I was able to successfully run all my virtual machines from the NTFS partition.