I have been running several Hyper-V VMs on Windows Server 2008 R2 for the past couple of years and enjoying perfectly adequate performance for my testing/development/r&d environments. I'm a software developer so my hardware knowledge is basic however I built the rig using: •Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard •Intel Core i7 960 3.20GHz (Bloomfield) (Socket LGA1366) •24GB triple channel RAM

The host OS is running on an OCZ SSD and all the VMs are running on a 2TB Marvell SATA3 RAID 0 array consisting of 2 Western Digital Caviar Black 7,200rpm drives. I have tested the speed of the 2TB drive and appear to be getting less than 3Mbs but it can adequately run a 4 VM farm including a DC, (SQL) database and IIS application servers.

I recently upgraded the SSD on which the host runs to a 256GB OCZ Vertex 4 and took the opportunity to upgrade to Windows Server 2012 and installed the Hyper-V role. I tried importing one of my existing Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs (and converted it to .vhdx) plus I have tried creating a brand new Windows Server 2008 R2 VM but both are running extremely slowly and I can see nothing obvious using the host and guest Task Manager/Resource Monitor tools. In both cases the VM has 8GB RAM (fixed), 4 CPUs, fixed size HD (not expanding) and is using an external virtual network running on a separate NIC to the host.

I have upgraded the BIOS to the latest available version and checked the virtualization settings. I have run out of "obvious" (to a developer) things to check/configure and my next option will be to re-install the host OS but before I do I would very much appreciate any advice from any experts out there.

Thanks