The upcoming maintenance release includes several changes that should dramatically improve performance in specific areas. These include
- The user and group management sections of the portal
- The advanced incident screen
- The incident reclassification screen
The first one has to do with performance improvements in the AD synchronization and better indexing, paging, etc when there are many groups and users (thousands). The second two are due to querying the NS for locations, business services, and categories. This should be dramatically faster now.
I will say that, no matter how much cpu and memory you allocate to a VM it will ALWAYS be slower than running directly on hardware because of the overhead of maintaining the virtual environment. VMs are super convenient but there is a price to pay.