What I'm hearing is that you're activley trying to install 2008, and that the install is running slowly. Probably could use a little more info about the enviornment, as other folks mentioned... but a few things that jump out at me...
- Obviously, the VM should perform better you complete the install and deploy VMware tools to the machine.
- But that aside, make sure you've selected the correct guest OS type in the VM configuration.
- You said you're connected remotley... probably a non-issue, but just to check - are you able to connect to the console of other 2 VMs and interact "normally"? And I'm assuming normal means they're responsive, etc.
- You said the datastore is a disk on the host - so that's direct attached storage (DAS), right? Are the other 2 VMs also on that host using the same datastore? Can you check those VMs from the console and make sure they're responsive? If they're not, then maybe you've got too much disk I/O on that datastore.
- Digging a bit deeper, I'm assuming you checked the performace tab and took a cursory glance at the host's utilization, if not... do that, and see if anything is pegged.
- What about esxtop - have you tried looking at that yet? http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008205
By any chance is this a whitebox, or some old server asset with maybe just 1 local 7200rpm disk drive?