>>Which VM provider?
>
>It's VMWare, but that's all my client knows because they're using a hosting provider.

>>I once tested a Microsoft Azure VM, very powerful as of spec. sheet (Standard A7: E5-2673 v3 8 cores, 56 GB RAM), very slow in practice: 3 times slower than our 4-year old VM (2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 0 @ 2.30GHz, 4 GB RAM) for the same application, same tables
>
>Were you able to resolve it?

Nope, the client just dumped this VM and returned to in-house hosting