I posted this important information in January 2019, and apparently some unhappy individual (presumably with VMWare) foolishly removed it, so here it is again. It is just as relevant today under version 15.5.x, as it was when I posted it back in January 2019:
As of version 15.0.2 of Workstation, this is still NOT fixed. VMware's claim of "performance improvements for virtual NVMe storage" are just hot air. I have extensively tested the latest versions of Workstation Pro 15 and Workstation Pro 14, and can definitively state that the SCSI drive option continues to be faster than the NVME drive option, and both are much slower than they should be within VMs. (Even under the SCSI option, read/write performance is DRAMATICALLY worse in the VM than on the host for NVME drives.) I tested using a Samsung 970 Evo 2TB NVME drive in all cases for this. There is not even a recognizable marginal improvement in NVME performance between Workstation 14 and 15. So, VMware has yet to actually address this problem. Notably, Workstation 15 continues to recommend SCSI drives over all others for performance, so at least that much is yet true. NOTE: Within a VM, NVME drives particularly suffer for multithreaded reads and writes, as may be seen in the AS SSD Benchmark tool's 4K-64Thrd (i.e., 64-threads) read and write tests.
There are very few reasons to upgrade to 15 Pro from 14 Pro IMO. Even 4K support is questionable: one can achieve workable 1080P across 1080P and 4K screens with Windows 10 (1809) for example. (Just set the host's resolution to 1080P before launching Workstation 14 Pro, AND ensure that you have set the "high DPI settings" appropriately: using the Properties for the Workstation Pro shortcut, go to the Compatibility tab, then "Change high DPI settings," and select "Program DPI" with "I signed in to Windows" for the corresponding dropdown option.) This said, the 4K support is nice if you do decide to fork out the bucks for 15 Pro. If you are using 15 Pro, you may also want to enable (check) "Automatically adjust user interface size in the virtual machine" (under VM --> Settings --> Hardware --> Display).
Now, regarding overall VM performance, including drive performance, here are your best options to date: use a SCSI disk (NOT NVME), select (enable) the "Disable memory page trimming" option under VM --> Settings --> Options --> Advanced, and select "Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM" under Edit --> Preferences --> Memory. (For this last option, you will want to ensure you have plenty of physical host RAM that you can spare (i.e., dedicate exclusively) to the VM (should the VM need it). Lastly, if you are using 15 Pro, you may want to set Graphics memory (under VM --> Settings --> Hardware --> Display) to 3GB.
Finally, if you are working on a system that has hybrid graphics (e.g., a laptop with an nVidia video card besides in-built Intel display graphics), you may want to use the relevant "control panel" application to instruct your system to use the discrete graphics card for vmware.exe and vmware-vmx.exe.