Ubuntu does bad things when this is enabled.

Avoid 2D and 3D accel settings, until you have everything else working the way you like.

Server VMs should stay with 9MB of vRAM don't waste it.

Desktop VMs should get all 128MB of display vRAM.

It was like wading through treacle navigating menus, windows and applications.

Enable ACPI and AHCI for all guests from 2003, WinXP and later. A problem arose when Ubuntu 15.04 was installed in VirtualBox and the performance was terrible.

It is possible to use virtio drivers under Windows, it is just a little harder. For Windows guests, use the SATA (storage) and Intel PRO/1000 (network) drivers.

Use the VirtIO drivers for Storage and Networking.

Never allocate more CPUs or RAM than you should.

It takes a good 7 or 8 seconds after pressing a key to see the character appear in the VM. Keep large files elsewhere, outside the vStorage. But the mouse, while it moves around normally, takes a long time to select an item and it takes a long time after I click before there is a reaction. VDI / qcow2 sparse allocations do reduce performance, but the reductions involved appear to be less than 10% since 2015.

On spinning HDDs, pre-allocate the entire virtual disk.

I don't know much about Player, but Vbox defaults are not good for Ubuntu releases that prefer a real GPU. It seems semi usable now so I'll leave it at that and wait till I build a better VM server, and probably use something better than virtualbox. There's lot of stuff that does not work well or at all in wine so I just use VMs.

If this is not a configuration problem, does it mean my machine is too weak for virtualization? If 7 is that much heavier than XP I might just stick to XP/2003 for windows stuff. My cpu is Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T5450 1.66GHz × 2. Opening Firefox will cause the system monitor to show cpu usage 100% in the guest, while the host shows that both cpus are evenly working around 60%. Idling with the system monitor open the (single) guest cpu never gets below 55% and could rise to 80 - 90% just by moving the mouse around. Is there anything I overlooked that could solve my problem?įeel free to ask for more info, and thank you for any help. I have 2 cpus and I can't give them both to the virtual machine. The host bios does not include a configuration option for machine virtualization.

I am running a Toshiba m200 laptop with 4GB ram and shared video memory.

I had a look around and I found contradicting opinions on VirtualBox versus VMware (free) so I thought to keep the former.īoth systems are updated, I installed the additions on the guest and I evenly split memory and video memory (64MB) between guest and host. I run a guest ubuntu 12.04 on a host ubuntu 12.04, with VirtualBox, and the guest is much, much slower than the host ( ALT+TAB takes 4-5 secs).

Virtualbox very slow windows 7