Here's my situation, I've got a client hosting two servers (one VM), with the host providing VMware Zimbra, the other Windows Small Business Server 2011. Unfortunately, the person before me had configured this setup as follows.

Host:

• Ubuntu Desktop Edition 10.04 (I know, again, not my choice) running VMware Zimbra
• 8GB of RAM
• On-board RAID1 of two 320GB Seagate Barracuda drives for the OS
• Software RAID5 of four 500GB WD Caviar Black drives on MDADM for bulk storage (sorry, I don't know the model #)
• A relatively competent quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU from the Nehalem architecture (not suspicious of this as the bottleneck)

Guest:

• Windows Small Business Server 2011
• 4GB of RAM
• Host-equivalent CPU allocation
• VDI file for OS hosted on the on-board RAID, VDI file for storage hosted on the on-board RAID

For some reason when running, the VM locks up when sitting nearly idle, and the VirtualBox process reports values of 240%+ in top (how is that even possible?!). Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I'm totally stumped on this one.

Happy to provide whatever logs you'd like to take a look at. Ideally I'd drop VirtualBox and provision this with VMware Workstation, but the client has objected to the (very nominal) costs involved. If hardware needs to be purchased to help, it will be, but we're considering upgrades a last-resort at this time.

Thanks in advance! *fingers crossed*