[ale] Speeding up VMs

[Alex Carver]

I'm playing with VMs on a home Win 7 computer so I can practice using
the same setup with a work Win 7 computer (the idea being to run Linux
in the VM for certain tasks).

Right now I've started using VirtualBox but it seems a bit slower than I
expected (I know it's going to be slower than bare metal).  Any
suggestions for improving the speed/efficiency of the VM?

The test machine is a Core i7 with 16 GB RAM so I've given the VM 4 GB
of RAM.  The installation process for the guest Linux is exceptionally
slow, though, which is why I suspect I've set something up wrong or
maybe VirtualBox isn't the best choice?

According to the guest machine properties, VT-x, nested paging and KVM
Paravirtualization are all enabled.

For the installation, I'm using this as an experimental platform to
learn how to install and manage LVM (and some other experiments on
something that I don't care if I have to wipe).  So I have one virtual
HDD of 20 GB split into three partitions (/boot, LVM PV, and swap), the
PV is part of a single VG and there's a single LV on top of that VG for
root.