Hi!
You`ve mentioned that OF and SW solutions didn`t fit you cause they are slow - had you any chance to investigate this?
I think it will be good idea if you`ll drop the email to support@starwindsoftware.com and one of the ingeneers will gladly help you to configure the system with SW properly or at least determine where the bottleneck is.
One quick question for now - can you confirm that you are trying to run SAN software on the VM?
P.S. I think that was some missconfiguration issue.