I recently spent some time improving the responsiveness of a Windows 11 VM on Unraid (Threadripper + RTX 3090 passthrough). The VM was usable but always felt slightly sluggish since a recent system transplant to a Threadripper 3960X based system., especially around UI responsiveness and window load times.

After working through it properly, a few key changes made a noticeable difference:

Main steps:

• Cleaned up CPU pinning (contiguous cores, proper SMT pairing, avoided CPU 0)

• Ensured CPU isolation (isolcpus) aligned with pinned cores

• Enabled hugepages and attached them in VM XML

• Disabled VBS fully (this was the biggest improvement)

• Tidied Hyper-V settings in XML (relaxed, vapic, spinlocks, vendor_id)

• Confirmed GPU was using MSI interrupt mode

• Verified CPU scaling was set to performance

The biggest single gain came from disabling VBS. Everything else contributed incrementally.

The VM is now noticeably more responsive, though still not quite bare metal. Next step for me is fixing NUMA exposure in BIOS, which should close that gap further.

I’ve written up the full process with details here:

One Box To Rule Them All: Improving Windows 11 VM Performance on Unraid (Threadripper)

Hopefully useful to someone else running a similar setup.

Not sure side effect for disable VBS, but interesting 👍