[OpenIndiana-discuss] Slow performance of guests in virtualbox on OI?

[Dan Swartzendruber]

So I have an OI151a7 box.  Latest vbox is installed with several guests.
Performance of a couple of windows7 VMs seems kind of jerky.  I started
playing around with iperf and such to see if network was the issue.  Between
guests on the same host and guests <===> host, I can barely crack 1gb (and
in some cases am barely hitting 300mb/sec).  I know it's not the HW, since
when I had ESXi on the same host, guests were able to hit 3-5gb/sec
internally.  I am wondering if this is just virtualbox issues?  Disk I/O
from guests seems fine - I run something like crystaldisk mark from a win7
guest and can exceed 130MB/sec both ways.  But if I launch a browser window,
it can take 4-5 seconds for it to appear, and clicking on links, likewise.
The host is not remotely loaded down (for example, right now, with 4 guests
running, load factor is 0.94).  I am trying to get my telecommuter VM and my
wife's (both 32-bit XP) migrated to windows 7, and if it's going to be that
laggy and slow, this will not fly with her (nor with me, for that matter!)
The previous incarnation was ESXi on the host, OI151a7 as a VM with the HBA
passed-in via vmdirectpath (pci passthru).  OI VM was on small local SSD
with ESXi.  Performance absolutely rocked.  This is a major step down.  Even
if I go back to the original plan, I'm still using OI as the NAS/SAN, but
I'd rather get off ESXi (if only because there are monitoring functions I
cannot run on the host...)  Any thoughts/ideas welcome...