My VM is slow

I first built a VM using Oracle Virtual Box on my former desktop, a Window 7 box with an i7-930 CPU and 8 GB RAM. It ran very SLOOOOOOW.

Well I upgraded to a much hotter box, a Dell XPS8920 with an i7-7700K CPU at 4.2 GHz running Windows 10. That should produce better results, right? I created a Windows 7 VM. And it, too, runs slowly.

How do cloud providers offer servers running multiple VMs that perform well when I can't get this top-level desktop to run just one VM? Sure, their servers are hotter than my desktop, and their CPUs might have more than my lowly quad-core. But still ... I just want to run one VM.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there something more that I need to know and do?

What have you assigned to the VM? How much memory? How many cores? Is it stored on your SSD or HDD?

VirtualBox is a bit slower than Hyper-V or VMWare but it works fine for me (for simple things like Office) and my hardware is much worse than yours. I use VirtualBox to VPN to certain clients that have specific VPN connection requirements.

I find with VirtualBox assigning 1 virtual processor (I have 4 cores too but my processor is much slower as it is a laptop), at least 2GB RAM and most importantly putting the VHD on SSD gives best results. If I increase the number of virtual processors the performance actually gets worse. There is quite a lot on the VirtualBox forums but the consensus seems to be you should assign the number of virtual processors to be less than or equal to the number of actual processors (not cores) that you have.

2 CPUs (out of 8 possible)
6 GB RAM
140 GB .vdi drive file (stored on a regular disk drive)

margrave55 said:

I first built a VM using Oracle Virtual Box on my former desktop, a Window 7 box with an i7-930 CPU and 8 GB RAM. It ran very SLOOOOOOW.

What OS are you using as guest OS?
Probably better results with wmware or using linux as host OS, possibly Hyper-V is better
for windows guest than virtualbox.

margrave55 said:

How do cloud providers offer servers running multiple VMs that perform well ...

they do not use windows 7 or 10 but much more specialized systems...

This host is running Virtual Box on Windows 10 Home. (On my previous desktop it was Windows 7 Home.) In both cases the VM OS is Windows 10 Starter.

There's no Linux here.

Can't use Hyper-V ... this is Windows Home, and I'm told Hyper-V is only for Windows Pro.

margrave55 said:

This host is running Virtual Box on Windows 10 Home. (On my previous desktop it was Windows 7 Home.) In both cases the VM OS is Windows 10 Starter.

Hyper-V is not available in win 10 home, maybe you can download it (?) it was possible in the past
not sure now.

If you want you can try Vmware Workstation Player (you can download it and use at no cost) and install
the guest OS in a 2nd internal Hard Disk

margrave55 said:

There's no Linux here.

I do not understand what you mean with "There's no Linux here", anyway what is generally referred as "Linux" is
a Free Software/Open Source OS available for download and use at will; it's used on many levels for cloud computing
and virtualization.
Since you asked "How do cloud providers offer servers running multiple VMs that perform well when I can't get this top-level desktop to run just one VM?" I gave you a hint about Linux because it is the way I know to do that.

By no Linux I mean ... I'm running Windows 10. For me that's the only possible host for a VM.

You mentioned VMWare workstation player ... but their web site says that the host must be one of these:

• Ubuntu 14.04 and above
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & above
• CentOS 6.0 and above
• Oracle Linux 6.0 and above
• openSUSE Leap 42.2 and above
• SUSE Linux 12 and above

So no joy there.

margrave55 said:

By no Linux I mean ... I'm running Windows 10. For me that's the only possible host for a VM.

You mentioned VMWare workstation player ... but their web site says that the host must be one of these:

• Ubuntu 14.04 and above
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & above
• CentOS 6.0 and above
• Oracle Linux 6.0 and above
• openSUSE Leap 42.2 and above
• SUSE Linux 12 and above

So no joy there.

You can also use windows in fact, and if you got a 2nd internal HD, run the VM from that to increase speed.

lx07 said:

I don't know why they hide the free Windows Workstation Player away so intricately on their website - to bore people into buying Workstation Pro perhaps. It certainly takes ages to find it.

It may seem but it's actually pretty simple, 2 clicks away from the main vmware page:)