Make VBox Guests to run faster or swich to another VM Enviroment?

[Marian-R]

Hello,

This is my first post here, but i am not really new. I've been using the forum to fix different issues that i had since i started to use Vbox.

Now, i need you help as i have the following issue: Virtual Box Guests (Windows / Linux) are quite slow in reaction when i am trying to use them.
Usually, if i am not in a hurry, all seem to work fine (but slow).

My current computer (W10 / i7-8565u/32gb RAM/ 512SSD) is being used for several VMs. Usually, i need to run 1 additional W10 guest machine. Periodically, i run W10 + XP + Linux guest (All 3 same time).
As i am running from SSD, the loading speed is good but not great. If i run the same machines from HDD, it's slow...
Even with SSD support and assigning 4-8Gigs of ram / 2-4 CPU Cores to my guests, they are running slow... I have done tests and it does not matter if guest is Linux or Windows. It's slow, especially Linux. Even if i tweak them as i found on some posts here, still not enough speed.

I am looking to migrate all the VMs from my computer to an older server that i have. The unit has older Xeon CPUs (6 core / cpu), 16Gb Ram (i can upgrade - DDR3 i think, need to check), SAS HDD (300GB)+ Usual 7.2k 500G HDDs. There some things that i can upgrade such as RAM (16-32Gigs additionally) + HDDs to some SSDs, maybe even some better CPUs.

The questions is: How can i make the VBox to run the guests faster ? I need a firm reply from them.
Is VBox capable of giving enough performance or should i switch to Type 1 VMs like vSphere / Oracle VM?
If so, do you guys have some indications for me?

I usually run Windows as host but i think this time i'm gonna switch to Linux environment. Any indication is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
Marian

[scottgus1]

Some known things slow down Windows 10 hosts. I don't have those problems on my Windows 10 hosts, and the VMs are perky.

Please right-click the VM in the main Virtualbox window's VM list, choose Show Log.

Search the far left tab's log for this text:

Attempting fall back to NEM

If you find it, Hyper-V is enabled and needs to be disabled. See HMR3Init: Attempting fall back to NEM (Hyper-V is active).

If you don't find that text, save the far left tab's log, zip the log file, and post the zip file, using the forum's Upload Attachment tab.

[dtpoirot]

As you probably know, running multiple VMs on a Linux host works much better in most cases...

One thing I found enlightening is running the Intel Processor Identification Utility on Windows. I found my CPU was not running as fast as expected.

After some manipulation, my Dell Latitude 5520 with a 2.90 i7 is now running at the proper 3.49 GHz

Good luck and best regards,
- dan

[Marian-R]

Hi guys!

Thanks for replying on this.
I have added one image that i am using quite a lot.

I found some Hyper V mentions but... nothing about fallback.

@Dan,
I tried to get the CPU to max freq. but it is the same. It is laggy.

Any other ideas?

Regards,
Marian

[mpack]

You should disable transparency effects in the guest OS, then enable 3D acceleration in VirtualBox. You may be asked to increase graphics RAM to 256MB at the same time. You are currently running a pretty high display size and bit depth with no hardware support... that probably isn't going to work.

Also update VirtualBox and the Extension Pack to the current version: 6.1.4 is more than a year old now.