windows 10 1809 slow

[FreddyFredFred]

I downloaded the Windows 10 1809 and Server 2019 ISOs the day they became available so I can start working on my templates.

I built the templates with EFI, paravirtual for the C drive and vmxnet3 adapter. I've been using this combo for other versions of windows 10/8/7and windows server 2008r2/2012r2/1016 without issue.

So far Windows 2019 (with desktop experience) seems to be ok at least for a basic vm and guest customization. Haven't tried anything else yet.

Windows 10 1809 on the other hand is very, very slow to reboot after the initial install or even just rebooting after making some changes post install. After installing the OS it took 10-15 minutes for the initial windows setup stuff (user, security settings, etc) to appear . I tried a VM set to BIOS and it seemed faster but was still quite slow. Server 2019 and other versions of windows 10 have no issue.

The hosts are esxi 6.5 and 6.7.

I haven't had a chance to try every combo of BIOS/EFI/vmxnet3/e1000e/paravirtual/lsi sas to see if one is the cause of the issue but was wondering if anyone else had noticed any issues or if it was just me?

Thanks

[jgemcs]

Dear VMware Team,

I've spotted exactly the same problem here at several Customers.

Please release the Hotfix as soon as possible.

Jens

[Digitalguardian]

Chiming in that we see this same issue as well with ESXi 5.5 (I know, we need to upgrade, it's why I got hired) with Windows Server 2019. Removing snapshots doesn't help, but our symptoms (long boot times, laggy mouse in console, etc) are all identical to what people here are saying. I'd be great if (in the next month or two) when we upgrade to ESXi 6.7, there is already a fix for this.

[BingyBam]

Screw the Windows 10 updates. With each update, they manage to slow the machine down even more.

[shahid3507]

Hi,

Any update on the patch ?
I am facing similar kind of issues over here.

[nschlip]

Well, I know View 7.8 has released but I haven't had a lot of time to fully review all the release notes, but the highlights of this release do not appear to mention anything about Windows 10 performance (though again, I still need to review all the release notes).

I'm also curious to know if agent 7.8 will resolve the persona issues we've experienced since 7.5 released (where persona won't sync correctly, and keeps office applications from launching / other oddities on the VM).

[sjesse]

@nschilp This is a specific vsphere issue, any persona sync issues are different. You may want to post directly in the horizon sub forum about that.

[nschlip]

Correct, was just mentioning it - we're still experiencing extremely log boot times and slugglishness on our Windows 10 1809 VM's - whether persistent or non-persistent.

The only way I can fix the boot time issue, is by migrating the storage for the VM, which then prompts to consolidate the snap (there are no snaps), and once consolidated, the VM boots within 5 seconds.

[BenFB]

Is this on VMFS 5 or 6 datastores?

[nschlip]

VMFS 5 datastores (using Pure storage)

[BenFB]

I would suggest opening a SR with VMware and possibly Pure. I mention Pure because they have high quality support with back channels to VMware if need be.

[TaiHaM]

Hi All,

We also faced same issue (hanging VMs, slow startup) and were able to fix issue with this:

Windows 10 1809 VDI may become "Agent Unreachable" state if the High Precision Event Timer (HPET) is disabled. (67175)

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/67175

[MasonLivingston]

Escalation manager told me the same thing.  They know about it and engineering is working to have it patched in U3.  No ETA.

[jamesarm97]

So I am having the same issue and reading up. I am running ESXi v6.7U2 and Windows 10 takes forever (at least 15 min) to boot. I got excited when I say the note about changing the one flag, but when I went to add it, It was already there and set to true so it must not fix everyone. I ended up removing all the snapshots and it started booting faster. I would have though that snapshots would be transparent to windows so I am not sure how windows broke it. I guess I will just live without snapshots or move to v5 VMFS

[smhvmware]

I don't see any information about vSphere 6.0 update 3 or any other build versions of 6.0.  Can anyone chime in if this Build 1809 problem is happening on 6.0u3 and/or specific builds of 6.0u3?

We're prepping our upgrade from Build 1709 to 1809 in our VDI environment, but this would be a game breaker for a few of our linked clone pools if snapshots take 2x longer to boot.

[matthewgONCU]

Has anyone tried 1903 to see if it's the same issue?

[FreddyFredFred]

I don't see any information about vSphere 6.0 update 3 or any other build versions of 6.0.  Can anyone chime in if this Build 1809 problem is happening on 6.0u3 and/or specific builds of 6.0u3?

The problem happens with VMFS 6 and that's only supported as of vsphere 6.5. If you're still on vsphere 6.0 then you're running VMFS5 so you should be ok....

[matthewgONCU]

Answered my own question.... It's still an issue in 1903. Blank OS boots up in 15 seconds. Added one snapshot and it went up to 1 minute 45 seconds. Didn't bother building an image with it.

[castroanth]

Glad to see there is a lengthy thread on this, I thought I was just losing my mind. For the record, migrating the VM to another data store and then consolidating does seem to have improved boot times significantly. I'll have to keep this in mind when we recompose in the future as a temporary workaround rather than sitting on my hands for half an hour for the VM to start.

[Raj1988]

Start of VMs with Windows 10 version 1809 running on snapshots on VMFS6 takes a long time and Without snapshots there should be no performance problems.

Workaround is to use VMFS5 or NFS Datastore. Issue to be fixed in a future ESXi release for 6.5 and 6.7 (Q3 2019) .

Regards,

AJ

[nschlip]

Thanks, this is helpful to know - we're using Win10 1809 still, with VMFS5 and vSphere 6.7 U1, and still have the horrible boot slowness. a Full Win10 VM boots just fine, but the moment you take a snap or provision linked-clone VM's from that initial VM, the boot times on those linked clones are 15-30 minutes, every time you restart one of them.