very poor performance on dual xeon

[adamf663b]

Up to about six months ago, I had windows 7 as the host OS on my HP xw8600 workstation with two quad-core intel xeon E5405 processors.
When running ubuntu in a guest vm, alloting any more than 2G of memory or 3CPUs was guaranteed to lock it up during bootup. In any case performance was dismal, slower than my intel atom dual core 1.4ghz laptop. Chrome in the linux VM ran about ten times slower than the same version of chrome on the windows host.

I now have things switched around. I'm running ubuntu 14.04 as the host. When running windows 7 in a guest VM, outlook (or any other app for that matter) takes about 10 times longer to load. Forget about even trying chrome; it's just not worth the 30-40 seconds needed to open it.

Tried vmware workstation 10 on same ubuntu 14.04 host, running the same windows 7 vm. It runs as one would expect. Maybe 5% slower than native, but certainly not 10 times slower!

In all of the above, both host and guest are 64 bit operating systems with guest vm tools installed.

In the bios screens for the HP, there aren't many settings for virtualization. I saw just one and it is enabled. I did not see a setting for IOMMU. Virtualbox reports that vt-x virtualization is present, but that nested paging isn't.

[mpack]

That is not a usage question, so I have no idea why you posted it in "Using VirtualBox". Moved to Linux Hosts.

Please note that without logs etc, nobody can comment usefully on your issues.

[Smackey's dad]

You may look to take a look at both host and guest resource usage. If you have the time, create a fresh install of Windows Guest (and perhaps a Ubuntu Guest as well) to see if it slow. It may help to identify if the issue is stemming from the Host OS or the Guest OS. And of course look at the VBox logs to see if there are any clues.