Thanks very much Kevin,

Well the power settings came up on some further digging I did and sure enough the physical machine that was performing "well" High and the "poor"...

OK, so I've tested on an instance on another physical machine that is exactly the same hardware spec as the other physical and the physical running the VM. In all...

So I've gone with the suggestion of selecting into variables (nice idea - thanks) and performance is still twice as slow on the physical machine vs the virtual one

Physical

CPU time...

Great, thanks for the reply.

1) Yep, I'm sure its all logical - I've re-run the query 20+ times and get the same performance difference consistently - I've used

SET STATISTICS...