Surface Pro 7 VM performance is extremely bad in VMWare/VirtualBox

[LightJack]

I own a SP7 (i7, 16GB RAM, 256GB Storage) running Windows 10 21H2 (stable).

For some time, the performance of VMs running in VMWare or VirtualBox is very low. (5-10 minutes to just start Windows setup.) Hyper-V VMs are running fine though.

For some reason it seems like the performance (mainly storage, but also CPU) is extremely low. Once I get Windows running in VMWare, its slow and the storage is pinned at 100% in the guests Task Manager. The hosts Task Manager looks fine. CPU is utilized to about 70%, and storage barely at all.

The VM is running off a Samsung T7 SSD, but I've also tried the SP7's SSD.

My Desktop is running VMWare and VirtualBox perfectly fine. (Same windows version and drive.)

Windows has been reinstalled already.

Any ideas?

[#2]

Hi,

I have some info (even though I'm still weirded out):

Since Hyper-V is enabled, it uses VT-X, so other software cant use it.

Therefore, VirtualBox is running without virtualization support in a sort of compatibility mode (which sucks.)

The solution written on the VirtualBox website is to turn of the Hyper-V hypervisor.

This isn't really practical for me, but I tried it anyway.

However, it didn't work. Deselecting Hyper-V in features (and in a couple of other tried basically anything that does anything with virtualization) did not make a difference.

Even stopping the hypervisor from starting via bcdedit did not do anything.

Idk if this is a Windows or VirtualBox problem at this point, but I wanted to share this so others may have an idea.

Regards,

LightJackl

[#3]

Hi,

Just a thought. I have a SP3 with VMware running and experienced significant performance degration in the guest system after some minutes, while accessing the guest via RDP.
The point is, that the host systems processor went down to 0,7 GHz, due to speedstep cpu feature. The guest system did show 2,73 GHz, but that is wrong.
I used throttlestop to overcome the speedstep issue. Now the performance of the host system is high like 1,68 GHz at any given time and the guest is running with very good performance.
Hope that helps a bit.

Cheers
Thomas