Oh, well that is to be expected. You are still basically virtualizing the application. You can't reasonably ask an app to run on a non-native platform with native performance.
Yup, pretty normal. Postgres is the database. Hashing never stops, baby.
Unitrends is constantly preparing itself for need to do an autosynth, and is working on the dedup and inline hashing and everything else all the time. It's pretty normal for postsgres to be pegged.
There we go, all set. Hopefully that will help some people get started with Chef since it is basically really simple but lacking a few specific things that you "just have to know" because Opscode does not document them (a gap in the Chef 12 documents) it is very hard for no reason.