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I have a Windows 7 x64 host with 2x Xeon e5620's and 144GB of RAM. Running VBox 4.1.4. I am trying to make an MS SQL Server with 8 procs and 96gb of ram. Here's what I have been seeing and this may very well be a windows problem.

The installation of 2008r2 seems to go ok. The peculiar thing is that when I boot up the 2008r2 VM It takes a very long time (40+ Minutes). If i open up task manager on the host I can see that the memory usage is slowly ticking up and up and starts ticking up slower as time goes on. So in the beginning of the boot it allocates about 1000mb per second, then 600, 500, 400, 300, 200, 100, etc. Sometimes I can get into the guest os before it allocates all the ram but then I notice that all the cores are maxed on the guest os. Once the ram allocation or checking or whatever is going on is finished, then the cpu usage goes to 0% and the system becomes responsive.

I have tried many different settings enabling/disabling NX, nested paging, host i/o caching. Same problem.

Here's the interesting thing, I tired Ubuntu with the same machine setting 8 proc and 96gb. It boots up right away, memory allocation is very low. Host memory usage is actually lower than the guest (host uses about 1gb guest is showing 2gb in use).

I am about to try the same thing with a linux host on the same box, and see how that goes, But I think it's going to have the same problem.

VM settings?
Could be the VM swapfile it is trying to initialize, hopefully you are running on sata and not ide which is too slow for such a setup, also try scaling down the amount of cpu's to 4.

vbox4me2 wrote:VM settings?
Could be the VM swapfile it is trying to initialize, hopefully you are running on sata and not ide which is too slow for such a setup, also try scaling down the amount of cpu's to 4.

I run with nearly no swapfile 64mb. Disks are intel 320 SSDs, I have tried it many different ways. first I created the machine with 4 cpus and 1gb, on a 40gb disk. This is fine. Then I would change the swap file to 64mb. Then shut down and increase the ram. It generally works ok up to about 32gb of ram regardless of number of cpus (1-16). I also tried this with a 2008r2 host and had the same problem. The interesting thing is the whole memory allocation on the host. Imagine a logarithmic curve for the physical memory usage graph in task manager, the graph rises quickly near the bottom but rises slower near the top. If I run the same machine under hyper-v and set it to be fixed at 64gb of ram (Hyper-v's limit) it allocates all 64gb within a few seconds. The memory allocation graph is a straight line (not vertical but probably about 10 degrees).

Again this only happens with a windows guest. Running Linux it's awesome, access to ram dynamically, not pre-allocating the ram like windows.

You're not having hyperv installed while using VBox are you? the 2 can not live together.

vbox4me2 wrote:You're not having hyperv installed while using VBox are you? the 2 can not live together.

No, I know Vbox has problems with that. First I ran Vbox then uninstalled vbox, installed HV then, uninstalled HV and reinstalled Vbox.

I thought it may have had something to do with guest extensions since under HV it worked better. So I tried to use a machine created in HV using MSs Gues Extensions and boot it in Vbox. Same problem.

MS guest additions and VBox?? the two are not made for each other.

vbox4me2 wrote:MS guest additions and VBox?? the two are not made for each other.

Yeah I know. Just seeing if anything makes a difference.