Prior to upgrading my machine to Windows 8, I was forced to use VMware Workstations 8 & 9 for development within a virtual environment.
My virtual environment within VMware Workstation 9 was:
Windows Server 2008R2
Visual Studio 2012
SharePoint 2013
SQL Standard 2012
16 GB RAM
4 Proc’s
When debugging SharePoint 2013 server-side code, all requests to SharePoint through the w3wp.exe process is extremely slow. Furthermore, stepping through code becomes very sluggish. Additionally, while debugging 2013, the Virtual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor process eats up anywhere between 20-30% of the CPU resources.