I figured I would post this here, since it may be related more to the server configuration than the SharePoint configuration or a combination of both? I'm open for ideas to try, or even feedback on things that maybe have been configured incorrectly as far as performance is concerned.

We have a medium MOSS 2007 install prepped and ready for receiving the WSS 2003 data to upgrade. The environment was originally architected by a previous coworker, and I have since added a few configuration modifications to assist with performance before we finally performed the install. When testing the new site collections & SharePoint install (no actual data yet), things seemed a bit slow. I had assumed that it was because I was accessing it remotely. Apparently the client is still experiencing this and it is unacceptably slow.

• 1 SQL Server running SQL Server 2008
• 2x SharePoint WFEs - hosting queries (no index)
• 1x SharePoint Index - hosting index (no queries)
• MOSS 2007 installed and patched up through December '09 on WFEs & Index
• All 4 servers are VMs, should have more than sufficient disk space & RAM (don't recall at the moment), and are running Windows Server 2008 - everything is 64-bit.
• The WFEs have Windows NLB configured, with a DNS name & IP for the NLB cluster. Single NIC on each server (virtual, since VMWare).
• The Index server is configured as a WFE (outside of the NLB cluster) so that it can index itself and replicate the indexes to the WFEs that will serve the queries.

Everything is configured & working properly - it just takes a minute or two to load a page on the local LAN. The client is still using their old portal (we haven't started the migration/upgrade just yet) so there's virtually no data or users. We need to either further tune the configuration, or fix anything that may have been configured incorrectly which is causing this slowness?

I've already reviewed & taken into account everything that I could find that was relevant before we even started the install. Does anyone have ideas or pointers? Perhaps there's something that I've missed?