I recently moved to unraid 5.  Now, Vbox was never a speed demon, but this is almost unusable.  I have a 6 core CPU and 4GB of RAM.  4 CPUs and 2GB of ram are assigned to this windows 7 VM...all running on my cache drive.

 

Primary purpose for this VM is to host an SQL DB, and download torrents for me.  CPU usage is all over the map, and managing from RDP is painfully slow.

 

Im thinking of building a physical box to remedy this, but im trying to cut down on power usage.

 

Ideas?

I would drop your cores to 1 for your VM.  I think you will actually see a speed improvement in VirtualBox over what you have now.  I've got three VMs on a N54L (dual core 2.2 Ghz amd if I remember correctly).  2 Win7 VMs (one 2GB mem other 1GB mem) and a WHS v1 VM.  I use them all the time as one of the Win7 VMs is the one I post from on these forums.  I had to up my memory to 2GB because I had too many tabs open in Chrome and it caused disk trashing on the Virtual HDD assigned to the VM.  Otherwise it is acceptably fast but it is only for browsing the internet and does not run a database.  The other Win7 VM has Quicken on it and I browse my financial websites so not very intense their either.

 

 

Or as guiper pointed out switch to a Type 1 hypervisor like Xen, KVM or ESXi.

Had exactly the same problem, my Intel i3 2100 was not enough to deal with a VM on Virtualbox with Sabnzbd downloading at 10MB/s even with all the cores assigned to the Virtualbox. Strangely CPU easily was spiking at 100%.

 

Upgraded to a i5 3470, moved to Xen as virtualization engine on top of Arch,  and with only 2 cores assigned to the new VM, Ubuntu Server, hardly 50% of both CPU's  are used while downloading at the same speed, and won a proper desktop environment on Windows 8.1, using the same machine that is 100% uptime running unraid, just adding a GPU there for the passthrough.

 

You might want to give it a try.

 

 

Thanks for the replies guys.  Bob, im dropping my Cores now to see if that makes a difference.  I love ESXi but my only issue is that I would then have to run a second machine...unless I virtualize unraid as well.

I have win7 VM running on vbox on an atom d510 and although it is slow it is managable.  I use it mainly for torrenting.  Gettiin speeds of 3MByte/s on downloads. I use one core and 768MB rm only.

Thanks for the replies guys.  Bob, im dropping my Cores now to see if that makes a difference.  I love ESXi but my only issue is that I would then have to run a second machine...unless I virtualize unraid as well.

I have 3 unRAID VMs on 3 ESXi servers.  unRAID virtualizes very well.  Have had NO problems in an unRAID VM on ESXi to date.  Wish I could say the same for my Windows VMs.  The first Windows VM running is fine on each but WHSv1 just doesn't want to run virtualized well on ESXi.  So far I've had better luck with WHSv1 running on VirtualBox plugin on unRAID on my N54L then I did as a 2nd Windows VM on ESXi 5.0.

 

I guess I should note I only run unMenu, bandwidth, powerdown & apcupsd plugins on my ESXi virtualized unRAIDs.

Bob,

 

Pardon my lack of research on the topic, but is it as simple as just enabling pass-through on my SATA controller card and presenting the actual disks to unraid through ESXi?

Bob,

 

Pardon my lack of research on the topic, but is it as simple as just enabling pass-through on my SATA controller card and presenting the actual disks to unraid through ESXi?

That is what I did.  You need VT-d or the AMD equivalent for it to work.  This means the CPU/MB/BIOS all have to be capable of VT-d.  I use the MB SATA ports for datastore drives for ESXi and my M1015 with SAS expander for unRAID.  With the SAS expander I can get up to 24 drives in unRAID.  Without it I would need 3 M1015s to get to 24 drives.

 

I am thinking about switching to KVM/Xen since ESXi is heading off into paid only territory.

I have access to esxi licenses so that's not an issue. Were you able to pass through your on board sata controller?  If not, I may have to swap some ports

I have access to esxi licenses so that's not an issue. Were you able to pass through your on board sata controller?  If not, I may have to swap some ports

No.  My MB controller would only pass all 6 or nothing - some other MBs will split them up - 4 and 2 for instance.  With ESXi you need a datastore drive so I had 6 MB Sata ports I could use for that - I'm using 1 the other 5 are not connected - although when I change datastore drives for a brief period of time I have a second connection setup.  My VMs all use cards like the IBM M1015 passed through to the VM for HDD access.  Since I wanted to maximize my PCIe/PCI slots I have my M1015 that is passed through to unRAID connected to a SAS expander (Intel RES2SV240) so that I can use up to 24 drives in unRAID off a single M1015 card.