Windows 10 VM - Horrible Performance

[sfarmer1]

I'm finally breaking down and asking for help as I've not been able to find the answer to this issue that I'm having.

Environment Details:

HP xw8600 Dual X5460 @ 3.16GHz

ESXi 6.5.0 Update 1 (Build 5969303)

64GB of RAM

2TB RAID

So the issue is solely with my Win10 Pro x64 VMs. These things are just outright slow as I'm thinking it has something to do with the latest U1 update to ESX. I've got Win7 VMs that are snappy without issues. I took one of my Win7 VMs and upgraded it to Win10 and that's when the problems arise. I've uninstalled the VMWare Tools... Nope, still bad. Re-installed, the tools. Nope, still bad. I even went on to install a dedicated SSD and copy this VM over to it to see if it would help. Nope, still bad.

Win10 VM Specs

CPU: 4 cores, 4 sockets, 1 Core per sockets

RAM: 4GB

Hard Drive: 60GB (thick provisioned) - SCSI controller

Video Card: 4MB

I'm thinking that this might be related to the U1 update but is there a fix? I'm out of ideas here.

Thank you!

[rchaubey]

can you check disk utilization.

https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2017/05/windows-10-vm-99-percent-disk-utilization-performance-is...

[sfarmer1]

I ran the OS Optimaztion tool and it found some 70+ items but I'm still seeing the issue. These VMs are pegging at 100% just by opening up task manager. I find that hard to believe when I have 4 cpus assigned to the VM. My ESX host isn't over-subscribed. I just don't get it. It's gotta be something easy.

[RickVerstegen]

Did you already check with ESXTOP to see if there are any issues with performance on cpu, mem and disk for these affected virtual machines.

[sfarmer1]

This is the output, where WIn10 is the problematic VM.

[RickVerstegen]

Can you also check disk utilization?

See VMware Knowledge Base

[sfarmer1]

[nettech1]

What does the task manager show as the highest cpu utilization process?

Use Process Monitor - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs as you would get more details about the running processes

[sfarmer1]

It's so bad I can't even run procmon.

I even updated my ESX server to 6.5 U2 hoping there would be a fix but nada. Could there be an issue with the ESX install itself? Worth a re-install?

Part of me thinks the VM isn't seeing all the processors.

[golddiggie]

Have you tried changing the vCPU configuration to 2 vSockets and 2 vCores each??

Is the VMDK thick eager or lazy zero?? IME, when there's poor performance (beyond what you would expect) and it's lazy zero, that's the reason. Converting to eager zero has typically resolved the issue there.

Which SCSI Controller type are you using?

[golddiggie]

Results from a quick Google search confirmed that Windows 10 ONLY supports up to two sockets. So, it's only seeing half your vCPUs. Change the setup to be no more than two virtual sockets and then see what the performance is like.

[sfarmer1]

So I've been playing around with the various CPU configs all morning. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Win10 has a max limit of 2 physical CPUs. No? So I've been playing with 2 CPUs, 2 vCores and 1 vSocket. To get the 2 vSockets and 2 vCores, I have to set the CPUs to 4.

The VMDK is Thick Provisioned, eagerly zeroed.

SCSI Controller is the LSI Logic SAS.

[golddiggie]

Have you tried one vSocket with 4 vCores (for 4 vCPUs) yet?? IIRC every time I've had a Win10 VM running on vSphere, I've made sure to keep it to no more than two vSockets. Never had a performance issue related to that.

[cvrich]

One thing that we ran into that helped alot was to turn off all power management on the hosts.. We use HP WS460C hosts and those were set to balanced power and the desktops would run slow to the point of not being useable. I went through each host and went into the BIOS and set them to Maximum power and all of the issues went away. Not sure if this is your issue but definitely something to check. Having it set to power savings was killing processor performance in this case. Hope this helps

[OITjason]

I know this is old, but the info still stands today.

Do NOT run an LSI logic.

You should be running a VMware Paravirtual controller with current vmware tools installed.

[rschmitz]

Hi @OITjason I've selected VMware Paravirtual Controller, but then Windows 10 can't see the disk when going through the Windows Setup.  It asks to load the driver.  How do you workaround that?

[OITjason]

Hi @rschmitz , mount your vm  cdrom drive to ISO, under the root that comes up, should be "vmimages", tools-isoimages, windows.iso. Windows should see the driver here.

Jason