Another option on the parallelism is to look at the cost threshold for parallelism. That's usually left at the default value of 5 which is WAY too low for most systems. You might try bumping that up to 25 or 30 as a starting point.

Since this is a virtual, we kind of can't trust the CPU measures, so be cautious about changing the maxdop settings unless you can also confirm from the VMWare monitoring that CPU is an issue.