Using Ubuntu 14.04 in Virtual Box on the Macbook Pro starting working really well, and I was able to take advantage of many of the advance features. It does cause the fan to kick on when it runs for a while.
These settings really bumped up the performance
- The clipboard bi-directional worked and so did the drag-n-drop setting
- Motherboard, Extended Features, Enable I/O Apic
- Use extra processor cores
- Processor, Extended Features, Enable PAE/NX
- Acceleration, Enable VT-x/AMD-V and Enabled Nested Paging
- Video Memory 64 Meg
- Storage, Controller SATA, Use Host I/O Cache - Really help YouTube Playback