Virtual machine very slow after migrating hosts

I have just migrated 4 VMs from windows server 2003 R2 to windows server 2008 R3. 3 of the machines are working perfectly, but the fourth is running incredibly slow.

Interactivity is mostly OK, but menu drawing is slow - several seconds to draw, when a program sleeps for about 5 seconds, it actually takes over a minute to wake up, and if I show the task manager performance window, the graph appears to be getting updated about once a minute, rather than every second.

To do the migration, I simply copied the hard drive images, and created new machines with the same configuration as on the source machine. I have checked that they are similar (apart from VB version changes).

Has anyone seen this issue?

Simon Callan

Posted 2010-11-12T11:31:36.900

Reputation: 131

Answers

I once had a similar problem. In that case the host OS was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and the guest OS Windows XP. After I upgraded VirtualBox the Win XP virtual machine became VERY slow.

I removed the virtual machine from the VirtualBox menu and re-created it with the same parameters as before, using the exact same hard disk image as before. Problem disappeared and XP became fast (well, as fast as a virtualized XP can be...) again.

Janne Pikkarainen

Posted 2010-11-12T11:31:36.900

Reputation: 6 717

I've tried recreating the VM, but there was no change in the behaviour. – Simon Callan – 2010-11-16T10:55:41.170

Have you checked the settings in that VM for accelerated graphics display?

CarlF

Posted 2010-11-12T11:31:36.900

Reputation: 8 576

1I've check these, and they're the same on both systems. – Simon Callan – 2010-11-16T10:54:21.360

The problem appears to be a bug in VirtualBox 3.2 (see http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7609 and and the related ticket #6842 for details), with our application tickling this bug somehow (though we don't appear to be calling any of the functions that are known to cause the isue).

I have changed back to VirtualBox 3.1 and things are behaving a lot better.

Simon Callan

Posted 2010-11-12T11:31:36.900

Reputation: 131