What is VMWare VMI and how can it speed up your SLES 10 SP2 & openSUSE systems?
Note that at this moment only the 32bit VMI kernel version is supported by VMWare.

A nice read : Virtualized SUSE runs better with patch vmwares vmi standard

Howto: Enable VMI with SLES 10 SP2

Also take note to this TID : TID 7002224 - Installing Admin Console on VMWare ESX guest using the SLES "VMI" kernel fails