Yeah, its real simple. On a physical box you have native access to the memory controller. On a VM you have to emulate the memory controller, so its MUCH slower.. Therefore the more RAM you give a VM the longer it's going to take to "LOAD" the page memory of the VM.
Take away some RAM and you will see it boot up about 20-30% quicker.
So that's why, 8GB takes a while to initiate....16GB even more so, which is why VM Ware initially softcoded the VM with 16Gb, beyond that would take WAY too long, so they prevented it. Now they figured out how to make it faster, so the VM's are larger RAM sizes. But it will still take a little time to boot 8Gb of RAM in a VM, this is normal... Do you really NEED 8Gb in the VM?
