Going by the general guideline of having the pagefile on a separate disk, I have attached a 6GB physical disk by partitions to a Windows 7 guest. From within the guest, I format the disk (drive E:) and then create a pagefile on it. No errors are reported but there is no pagefile on E: before or after the reboot. Windows still thinks it has a pagefile on that drive as shown in the virtual memory configuration window. I changed the VMware settings for the virtual disk from non-independent to independent and persistent but that did not help. Either way, I am able to create 'regular' files and folders on E: from within the Win7 guest so WS10 can read/write to the drive just fine.
Didn't see any restrictions in the docs on this configuration. I've got a workaround (reconfigure the hard drive, adding the 6GB to the partition that holds the guest vhd) but it will take a while since this is a single hard drive core i7 laptop. The problem occurs on Workstation 10.0 and 10.01 on a Windows 8 host. Anyone else have experience with this configuration?