Moving from VMWare to Physical Server

 Hello
I am currently running Matlab R2014A with EEGLab plugin installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server using Remote Desktop services (the server is accessed by remote users coming in over a VPN). This windows server is running on a VMWare ESX host (4.1) with 12GB of memory and 2 vCPUs. I am told that performance is extremely slow and that jobs that take a half an hour on a local server take 6-8 hours on the VM server. This is only a 2 (soon to be 3) user license so the server is not accessed by a lot of people. Is anyone running Matlab under VMware? If so do you notice a performance hit? I was reading that Matlab is not qualified to run in a virtual environment so I am looking into switching to a physical server.

Can anyone tell me the system requirements for Matlab to run over remote desktop running on Windows server 2008 R2? My hope is that the physical server will enable Matlab to run quicker but my concern is under-sizing the new server. I was thinking of this for a server: Dell R10 Rack Server Windows Server 2008 R2 2 - Intel Xeon E5-2640 6 core processors 16GB RAM 5 - 500GB 7.2K drives (not sure if I need to get 10K or 15K drives)

Any feedback is greatly appreciated Thank you! Des