Slow Performance of Oracle Virtual Box within Azure Windows 10 VM

Jevon Davis 141

Hello,

I currently have a Oracle Virtual Box Setup with Azure on a windows 10 Machine. It works and everything but I realized the performance isn't the best. So currently I am using a D4s_v3 series VM for this but setting up a Kali image with Virtual Box is pretty slow. For eg. it will take 10 minutes to get to the Kali login screen vs it taking less than two minutes on my Windows 10 host machine.

Does it matter the series that is used or is this just an expected performance drawback of Nested Virtualization within Azure?

1 answer

Andreas Baumgarten 96,926 Reputation points MVP

2022-01-07T19:55:56.957+00:00

Hi @Anonymous ,

let's take it like this: "Nested Virtualization in addition with a combination of different virtualization solutions doesn't speed things up" ;-)

The advantage in Azure is: Resizing a virtual machine for testing is easy, fast and doesn't cost that much.
I would just resize the Azure VM at least to the double and do some tests.
After the tests are done decreasing the size of the VM is easy as well.

Also it might be interesting to find the real cause for the lag of performance. It's the Azure VM (CPU, RAM, Disk) or maybe it's related to the Oracle Virtual Box as a nested virtualization.

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten
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2 people found this answer helpful.
Jevon Davis 141 Reputation points

2022-01-07T20:01:01.6+00:00

Thanks Andreas, currently it's D4s_v3 series with 4 cores plus 16GB of RAM. Are you recommending to change the series?

Andreas Baumgarten 96,926 Reputation points MVP

2022-01-07T20:13:31.937+00:00

Hi @Anonymous ,

this depends on how much testing you want to do.
I would start with increasing the size in the same series.
But if you think the issue more related to the Dv3 series you can give the new Dv5 series a try as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/dv5-dsv5-series

A test matrix could look like this:
Test D4s_v3 -> to get the base line
Test D8s_v3
Test D4s_v5
Test D8s_v5

Beside just measure the time you should also take a look on the performance values of the VM (CPU, RAM, Disk).

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten

Jevon Davis 141 Reputation points

2022-01-07T20:40:39.197+00:00

Okay, I'll do some additional tests and share my results

Jevon Davis 141 Reputation points

2022-01-09T01:24:48.927+00:00

@Andreas Baumgarten tried it, same result right across the board. Funny enough I remember something awhile back I believe on version 2004 the performance was good but since it upgraded it has become unstable. Not sure how it works on other images but it seems Kali Linux Oracle Virtual Box is unusable. Kali Linux isn't available in my region in the Azure Market Place so that's a bummer. Is there any alternative you could suggest to get it up and running in Azure in anyway?

Andreas Baumgarten 96,926 Reputation points MVP

2022-01-09T09:38:22.593+00:00

Hi @Anonymous ,

have you tried a different hypervisor like Hyper-V for the nested virtualization?

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten

Jevon Davis 141 Reputation points

2022-01-09T23:10:44.823+00:00

Yeah I have tried Hyper-V Manager but never liked it but guess I will have to go back to it. It always messes up my network settings in some way which prevent me from logging back into my VM. When it messes it up on my local windows 10 machine it's fine because I can reset the network adapter and it is all good but for some reason all the troubleshooting done in the Azure Portal doesn't yield the same result so I have to end up deleting the VM and starting from scratch. Do you have any other alternatives to Hyper-V Manager? If not I guess I would just have to work with it

Rodrigo Ribeiro 27 Reputation points

2023-04-12T11:45:23.1566667+00:00

Hello everyone,

I've encountered a problem while trying to use VirtualBox for a CI/CD solution.

Although I was able to set up VirtualBox on my Windows system, I faced significant slowdowns when attempting to use some VMs in Azure, specifically the Standard_E2ads_v5. Interestingly, the same setup on my notebook was much faster.

While trying to install Windows Server Core, I noticed that the "Loading files..." screen would pass but the subsequent screen with a loading circle would freeze indefinitely. Similarly, when attempting to install Ubuntu, the installation process would freeze at certain screens with loaders.

Upon further investigation, I found that the VirtualBox VM process was consuming a lot of time and utilizing 50% of the CPU in user mode. My suspicion is that this might be due to nested virtualization.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues or have any advice on how to resolve this problem? I would greatly appreciate any insight that you can provide. Thank you!
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