I am seeing the same problem (frequent pauses) with Linux guests on a Windows 7 64-bit host. During the pauses, I see lots of disk I/O to the physical host drive housing the vmdk virtual disk files from the vmware processes on my host workstation and lots of VMware log messages saying it took 2 seconds up to 8 seconds for a SCSI command to complete. Oddly there are absolutely zero errors on the Windows host side for that drive, and while all the VMware Linux VM pausing is happening with the high disk I/O, I can browse to the physical drive (the one housing the vmdk files) within Windows just fine with absolutely no speed problems.
In short, the pausing and problems with high disk I/O seem to be totally isolated to the VMware processes and the virtual machines. I have a Fedora VM and a Ubuntu VM that both exhibit this behavior. The pausing is sort of random, but very aggravating. Never saw this with Workstation 7.x.
