App volume agent make VM slow

[HussamRabaya]

we have noticed that when App volume agent is installed in the master image (windows 7 sp1 ) , vDesktops become very slow

and removing it make it much faster

any idea why?

[Ray_handels]

It depends on what you consider to be slow.

What we do see is when the golden image cannot reach the Appvolumes server and the service is started that logon is very very slow (up to 2 minutes to log in) because the agent tries to reach the server. This can be changed using a reg key but because we only have this issue when creating our packaging machine I don't care that much.

Other than that, Appvolumes is a filter driver that checks changes being made to the file system. So every action that is being executed will be monitored and checked by Appvolumes. It also depends on your machine. I would not suggest using a 1 vCPU machine with Appvolumes as the filter driver uses 1 during logon.

[matthiasFF]

We've noticed this as well. As soon as the Appvolumes service is stopped, the whole user experience is much faster. Especially our CAD-Users have mentioned this.

Our floating pools have 8GB vRAM, 4vCPUs and a K220Q vGPU - users are still complaining about AutoCAD being slow.

Replicas are hosted on SSD Storage with more than enouph IOPS.

[HussamRabaya]

i know company opened call with support for the same issue and support took much time to diagnostic with no luck , at the end the have removed the app volume from the environment

[Ray_handels]

I do believe that you need to consider your use case for Appvolumes and you need to compare apples with apples.

If you install an application locally on a machine it will always be faster that using any kind of application virualization, be it Appvolumes, APPV, or ThinApp or whatever tool you want to use.

The best usecase for Appvolumes is that you can use floating pool VDI machines in which you can provide users with their own personal desktop without having to buy a multitude of physical machines that are not doing anything. I do now that Autocad works but I'm not quite sure if this is the best usecase for Appvolumes or VDI in general.

The big positive about VDI (and Appvolumes) is that you can share resources and provide users with a decent desktop everywhere they are without the need to carry around a heavy laptop (or in the case of Autocad a Workstation Pro ). You do get penelized somewhere, with VDI and Appvolumes it's a loss of a little bit performance on applications. With most office applications we don't see this to be honest.

[matthiasFF]

If you install an application locally on a machine it will always be faster that using any kind of application virualization, be it Appvolumes, APPV, or ThinApp or whatever tool you want to use.

AutoCAD is obviously installed on the base image.

I do now that Autocad works but I'm not quite sure if this is the best usecase for Appvolumes or VDI in general.

I know the use case for Appvolumes and VDI as well. Why was VMware and NVIDIA pushing the vGPU tech if AutoCAD isn't meant for VDI?

[Ray_handels]

I know the use case for Appvolumes and VDI as well. Why was VMware and NVIDIA pushing the vGPU tech if AutoCAD isn't meant for VDI?

Marketing??? . And Nvidia en VMWare already stated a year ago that if you would like to get a good user experience with W10 on VDI you would almost need to go for vGPU. Looking at a basic W10 machine without to much bells you already need about 300 MB of video memory.

If an application is installed on base image we don't see the application being slowed down by Appvolumes that much. You could also exclude the Autocad process from the Appvolumes filter driver, it will not bother with anything related to Autocad and thus it will work as it would do on a VDI machine without the Appvolumes agent.

[matthiasFF]

lol, agreed

If an application is installed on base image we don't see the application being slowed down by Appvolumes that much. You could also exclude the Autocad process from the Appvolumes filter driver, it will not bother with anything related to Autocad and thus it will work as it would do on a VDI machine without the Appvolumes agent.

This is done in the snapvol.cfg file? I will try that, thanks for the input.