Everything is directly installed on the VM including the source tree.
My VM initially had the max Xp memory allocated. This made no difference at all.
Currently (depending on how much gets built) I have to literally shut down the VM, purge memory, then restart.
I can get away with that twice then I have to completely reboot my macbook.
The project:
If I do a fresh clone from Git the project takes approximately 2 hours to compile and link.