Windows Server 2016 Guest on MacOS Host (So Slow, It's Unusable)

[socratis]

Surely VirtualBox on Mac OS X Hosts would have been a better choice.

The "OSX Hosts" section wouldn't necessarily be a proper fit either, because according to the OP's statement:

on my 2013 Mac Pro ... the Windows Server 2016 guest VM properly

A much better section would have been "Ancient hardware and unfulfilled expectations", we may have to create one...

VirtualBox doesn't have OS preferences for most part. There *is* one significant difference between OSX and every other supported host, and that is the lack of "raw mode" availability. But as you very well know, this does *not* affect equipment that has VT-x available, so it's a non issue on real Mac hardware, they all have VT-x, ever since the first Intel Mac came out.

We're veering off-topic, but for completion, VirtualBox on OSX *does* have a problem with nested virtualization, where you can't even run a DOS client on an OSX VM, because VT-x is not available and VT-x *is* required on an OSX build, no matter what. We are NOT dealing with such a situation here.

[og1]

It's often said the process is more important than the results (on many complex systems real world systems, when people are involved, there's an element of randomness). Getting the process mostly right, requires significant study and understanding.

My first inclination in the process to figure out what was happening, was to hypothesize the issue was with the configuration of the Windows guest. Thus why I put my original question in this sub-forum on Windows Guests. Remember, for some reason, the Linux guests on this 2008 Mac Pro host run OK.

The 2008 Mac Pro's we have all run great(some of the best hardware I've ever seen on a workstation). Though MacOS 10.11 is the last OS version for the 2008 Mac Pro (Apple still doesn't publish public EOL dates), but they continue to patch 10.11 (just issued a patch a week or so ago), so there's no reason not to use this excellent hardware.

Obviously, I've augmented that 2008 Mac Pro server significantly given our resource intensive programs. As long as it continues to work just as good as the 2013 Mac Pro, we'll continue to use it as it's a much more flexible computer (no secret Apple screwed up the design of the 2013 Mac Pro when they put aesthetics ahead of functionality. There's a lot of those 2008 Mac pros still active and they are still exchanged on the grey market which I use actively. My best performing workstations (all our workstations/servers, new or used, are very high end given the work we do) are, surprisingly, the ones I built myself from high end used server parts.

From reading some of the responses to my original questions on the Windows guest OS not working, led me to investigate the angle that VirtualBox itself (though VirtualBox say 10.11 Mac Hosts are supported). I don't have time to really get into the details, I know what I need to know now. But it seems the VirtualBox development and testing has not been as thorough as it probably should have been, at least with respect to the Windows guests on Mac OS hosts. If this is more useful in another sub-forum, I'll be glad to move it given what I know now.

I hope this helps.