I thought i would share my experience if its not already known when using the elevator=deadline grub option to force the kernal to use the deadline I/O scheduler you will probably have vm guest performance problems considering this scheduler is not really well suited for use with vmware. At least from my experience. Below are a few indicators that you should probably change youre scheduler to something like cfq.
when logging into the vm you get multiple characters being typed as if you have a latency problem.
you have some very jerky (intermittenly) behavior with I/0 based operationsin the VM.
If you are running a asterisk (trixbox etc) you will notice terrible cut outs and seems unuseable.
My system configuration:
Centos 5.4 with AMD dual core processor and 2 gig of ram.(The default I/O scheduler is cfq with centos)
I had changed the I/O scheduler to "deadline" to speed up the graphics loading and initial response time of the machine. This makes a big difference but is a bad idea if you want to run any guest VM's on the same machine. I changed it back to cfq after pulling my hair out looking for answers and wow what a difference! Much smoother I/O operations! I can now run trixbox and two other VM's and 3 ip phones all working beautifully!
My experience,
Pat B