Hi,
I'm running Ubuntu (guest) inside Windows 10 Pro (host) on VMWare Workstation Pro. Ubuntu runs a couple of docker containers, specifically HTPC Download Box (https://github.com/sebgl/htpc-download-box). My goal is to create a NAS solution with download capabilities and some Home Theater PC functionality (Plex) on fairly low power hardware (low-end x86). I intend to create a low-power home server system with low wattage to cut down on power consumption costs.
During my initial testing I've noticed that some functions are running more slowly as I would have expected. Surely I did not expect the same performance as natively installed software, but this runs way slower. Download speed (usenet) is more than ten times slower than the same software running natively on Windows. Also the CPU appears to be throttling; e.g. when extracting archives, the download speed drops considerably. When extraction finishes, the download speed returns to what it was before. During these times, the CPU usage is half to quite high when seen in htop, and even higher when seen in Windows Task Manager (too high for a simple task as downloading). Everything runs the same with or without Hyper-V enabled (as far as I've seen).
Is this the kind of performance I should expect from this hardware? Should I run everything on a Linux host OS instead of in a VM? The reason I'm running the Windows host OS is because of some pieces of Windows-only software. But I'm certainly willing and able to look past that and go the Linux host OS route.
I'm not sure what is going on, where to look or what to do now. Can anyone shed some light on my configuration, my goal and maybe my misguided intentions 
Greatly appreciated!
Hardware specs:
- Asrock J5040-ITX motherboard with integrated Intel Pentium Silver J5040 CPU (quad-core, 2Ghz) https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/197304/intel-pentium-silver-j5040-processor-4m-...
- 16 GB RAM
- Samsung Evo SSD for the OS
- 4x 12TB HDD for storage
- Using 4 onboard SATA3 ports + a PCIe SATA card for additional SATA3 ports
Software specs:
- Windows 10 Pro (host)
- Hyper-V platform (hypervisor and services) is enabled at this moment (not sure if VMWare Workstation uses or needs it)
- VMWare Workstation Pro 16
- Ubuntu Server 20.04