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Some comments:
1. Win2003 by itself is not interesting. There are other O/Ss mentioned in this BZ.
2. I would try it with "swapoff -a" to make sure that is it not a matter of swapping (on the host).
3. It might also be related to proper NUMA mapping of the guest to the physical memory.

1) No NUMA binding:
first boot: 9 minutes

2) guest NUMA matching host NUMA, with proper mbind:
first boot: 3min 30secs
system reboot: 2 minutes

3) 2)+VCPU PINNING:
first boot: 2m40s
system reboot:  1m20s

Since its likely that such huge guests should have NUMA information 
exposed to guests, and with static NUMA binding, marking this bug 
as duplicate of 996259.

Test 2 was performed with multi-node NUMA binding feature.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 996259 ***