Like you, I was hoping for a major improvement with 17, which by default I did not see. I have had the same e-core issues since moving to an i9-12900K. I would like to contribute some observations from today's testing, if that might help.
Using the Intel XTU utility, I too had noticed that the e-cores, rather than the p-cores, were being used by VMWare, specifically while running benchmarks on my Linux and Windows (11) guest vm's. In order to circumvent the issue, I had tried a couple of things in the past.
First disabled the e-cores in bios. This resulted in a dramatic performance improvement in the benchmarks, as might be expected...typically by a factor of 2 to 1 or so. This, of course, is not an acceptable long term solution.
Next, I specified cpu affinity, as has been suggested in a couple of other posts. This too worked well for my linux vm, pushing activity to the p-cores. Performance essentially duplicated the results of totally disabling the e-cores in bios. Since the Windows 11 vm needed to be encrypted, however, editing the vmx file for cpu affinity has not really been an option, without deleting the tpm and then decrypting.
In looking at the doc again, and also based on a reference in another post, I today changed the default "input grabbed" priority ("edit>preferences") to "high" (not sure why the default is "normal"), and made sure my vm's were using the default . I saw activity now driven to the p-cores, not the e-cores. Results were similar again to totally disabling the e-cores. This, however, is only the case while the vm has focus. If it is placed in the background or loses focus, activity reverts to the e-cores. Unfortunately there is currently no "high" priority option for "input ungrabbed", as far as I can tell. So running a long task in the vm, and wanting to switch to something else in the meantime, results in the e-core performance degradation.
This works for me, by the way, when running vmware as a standard user (my preference), and with either a "balanced" or "performance" power plan in the Windows host, which in my case is also Windows 11, 22H1 at this point. My "balanced" plan has a cpu minimum of 5%, max of 100%.
My config: i9-12900K processor, 32G memory, Windows 11 22H1 host. Ubuntu 22.10 vm, Windows 11 vm, each specifying 8 cpu's and 8G memory. Linux benchmarks are Mathematica 13, and a hand-coded python single-thread cpu burner. Windows benchmarks are Cinebench and the same python program.
I have used vmware as a programming tool for many years, but had been flummoxed by this recent e-core issue. So I would certainly welcome anything in the doc or other posts I might have missed. It would seem that many other have encountered the same issues. Unless I've missed something, I cannot believe it has not received more attention.
Any other experiences, observations or pointers welcome, of course.