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

[Dan Swartzendruber]

To clarify: this was all kinda subjective.  To wit: remote desktop to a 
windows guest.  Move the mouse around, click on start menu and/or 
program icons, do various activities.  Under vbox/vdi, this was laggy 
and 'jumpy'.  I tried the zvol trick and it was better but still not 
great (and has the disadvantage of my needing to hack around on the 
command line to create new guests and make sure the zvols are chowned 
properly on reboot, etc...)  I know it's not perfect, but I also tried 
running crystaldiskmark and got about 140MB/sec read with vbox/vdi and 
about 200MB/sec vbox/zvol.  The main thing was: I can guarantee that if 
the lag/jumpiness doesn't go away, this will be a non-starter with my 
wife (I wasn't real happy either, to be honest...)  I shutdown the host 
and pulled one of the mirrored disks in case I changed my mind.  I 
reinstalled ESXi on the SSD and did a fresh win7 install on the exact 
same data pool (only now, OI 151a7 is now the virtualized SAN/NAS like 
originally with HBA passed in via vt-d).  Did same subjective 
experiments and everything runs as smoothly as I remembered.  I like 
hacking around on the command line as much as the next guy, but there 
has to be a payoff for it, and the various experiments I have tried (kvm 
on debian [aka proxmox], vbox on OI/vdi, vbox on OI/zvol) just haven't 
met that criterion.  OTOH, I have nothing but praise for OI when it's 
acting as a storage back-end...