Windows Server 2022 extremely slow in Proxmox VM

[shactheorb]

Trying to install Windows Server 2022 in Proxmox for the first time, but no matter what I do it seems to be incredibly slow. Things like file explorer, applications, installers, etc. take a long time to load, while the CPU sits at single digit usage and memory usage is below half. I'm guessing I'm not setting something up correctly, just not sure what that might be. I've tried following the Windows Server 2022 best practices guide, random youtube videos, etc. without much luck.

Here's my current VM config settings, please let me know if there's any other useful information I can grab. That SATA10-1 drive is a RAID10 ZFS disk set up within Proxmox (not hardware RAID) made up of 4 8TB hard drives. Also the server is a laptop with an i9-11950H and 80GB RAM.

agent: 1
bios: ovmf
boot: order=scsi0;ide2;ide0;net0
cores: 8
cpu: host
efidisk0: SATA10-1:vm-304-disk-0,efitype=4m,pre-enrolled-keys=1,size=1M
ide0: local:iso/virtio-win.iso,media=cdrom,size=771138K
ide2: local:iso/SERVER_EVAL_x64FRE_en-us.iso,media=cdrom,size=4925874K
machine: pc-q35-9.2+pve1
memory: 8192
meta: creation-qemu=9.2.0,ctime=1761249818
name: WinServ3
net0: virtio=BC:24:11:2D:49:70,bridge=vmbr1,firewall=1
numa: 0
ostype: win11
scsi0: SATA10-1:vm-304-disk-1,cache=writeback,size=100G
scsihw: virtio-scsi-pci
smbios1: uuid=1bd5d2b6-8e64-48d5-b45f-37f650e916bf
sockets: 1
vmgenid: 1e74bd04-cab1-4c0c-880a-b93a0ccce68e

 

[guruevi]

First of all, convert your disk and network to VirtIO , not SATA/SCSI. Also check your disk cache settings, NTFS is not designed for full-sync writes which is the default in Proxmox and on spinning drives that would be relatively slow regardless of OS. Beyond that, make sure you have all the patches and you may be dealing with the mitigations for various CPU bugs which may be enabled from the Linux kernel out, so you have to enable those mitigations in registry keys.