We had an old Windows XP server running a Filemaker database on a 2.6 GHz Intel CPU, but that server died. It's been replaced by a box with two 2.4 GHz Xeon CPUs and 5 GB of RAM that's running Ubuntu 11.04 natively, and Windows is running as a VirtualBox guest. 2GB of RAM has been dedicated to the Windows guest.
Of course, these old Xeon CPUs don't have the VT-x extensions, so I wouldn't expect to be able to add CPUs to the VirtualBox guest, but the Filemaker database is running at least 2-3x slower than it did on the old server. I would expect that utilizing one 2.4GHz CPU out of four available shouldn't result in such an astounding difference.
I would also like to be able to continue using this setup, since it would also mean we'd be able to remove our Linux server from the rack, which is running on even slower hardware (not that the system requirements are high for its job though).
So my question is: Why is this so slow? Is there anything I can do to change the situation? Or should I just give up now and find more suitable hardware?
Please note: I understand that the "new" machine should be about 1% slower in theory, so please don't tell me this "should" be fine. I need more concrete answers (as in, "I've tried this before and you should do X") since in the real world, it appears to be about 50% slower. I'm about to blame "virtual" CPUs to multithreading on single core processors, and possibly the difference in CPU architecture between Xeon and Pentium 4 CPUs.
Best Answer
Those CPUs should have VT so if you have a BIOS that does not let you turn it on, then move to another box that DOES let you turn VT on. You shouldn't try to run Windows guests without VT.
Databases are usually limited by two things. First of all disk speed, and secondly, the availablility of RAM to cache the data that they read from disk. Is it possible that the old box was optimized for database serving with a fast hard drive and you are now on a server with a slow desktop hard drive? It sounds like you have a reasonable amount of RAM if the guest server has 2 G available to it, unless this machine has a very high demand. How many users access it at one time?
If you just cloned the Windows hard drive to make the VM, it is possible that there is some configuration setting that is making life difficult. Did the old machine have 2 cores? If so, then it would be a good idea to test giving the VM 2 cores because either XP or Filemaker might be configured to expect that.