I am trying to rationalise the use of my system disk (Mavericks), and am wondering whether I can (or should) relocate my .pvm files to an external USB drive. Has anyone got any thoughts on this? If I can, what effect will it have on performance
You can relocate the .pvm packages. Just double click on them to register when they are on their new location. The performance impact is related to how fast the external disk and interface is versus the internal, there is one immediate benefit, since the virtual machine is located in a different disk than OS X you wont' be competing for disk I/O if OS X and the VM are accessing the disk at the same time (making access slower for both).