It might also help to attach the log of the VM that performs as expected as well. One thing that might help for diagnosing is to attach the vmware.log file of the slow VMs here so that we can start by looking at the virtual machine configuration.
There are many factors that can affect the performance. For more information about Outlook performance issues, see You may experience application pauses if you have a large Outlook data file. pst file, the performance issue may be occurring on the server. Lastly, it is difficult to guess why one Outlook in one VM would be faster than in another VM. If your Outlook client is connected to Exchange in online mode, and you do not have high item-count folders in a. The knowledge base article about that feature is here: Unlike the case with humans, this less-than-zippy performance isn't. The performance related setting is 'disable side channel mitigations' and can be found in the menu 'Virtual Machine' -> Settings -> Advanced. Performance Issues Over time, computers, like their human keepers, tend to slow down. The Player version is not crippled to be less performant, it just has less features. It is the license that determines the player versus pro functionality. In fact the Player version is the exact same version as the Pro version except it has a different license assigned.
First things first, this is certainly not a VMware Fusion Player versus VMware Fusion Pro issue.
