Very sluggish response on two 'ftp' servers

[mdreinders]

I'm trying to diagnose the cause for the VERY sluggish response on two VMs running Windows Server 2003 R2, SP2, x86.  I recently migrated them to a better host using 4 vCPUs and 4 GB Ram.  Both VM's show appropriate info in Task Manager.  I'll attach a bunch of screenshots of what I think is pertinent info to this posting.  If anyone needs any other info to help troubleshoot, please let me know.

In the Disk Usage screenshot, the host CPU usage is 1491Mhz.  The server is 'idle' right now, so I do NOT know why it is consuming so much CPU.  This is the core issue.  With 4 vCPUs, it should fly.  It appears that whenever you do almost anything, with ANY background task running, it slows to an absolute crawl.

Yesterday, I would estimate it took well over an hour to install Piriform Defraggler 2.09.  Yes, when it can be installed in 10 seconds on a desktop.  What?

Basically, before I delve into it being a Windows software issue (unlikely as I have two VMs both running FTP server software, and they both have the exact same problem), I want to make sure there are no errant VMware settings on these VMs I need to fix/tweak.

Thanks again for all your help!

Michael R.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

This is the core issue.  With 4 vCPUs, it should fly.

Have you tried it with a single vCPU to see if it behaves any differently? More vCPU doesn't necessarily equal more speed.

How many other VMs are running on these hosts? What about the storage - direct-attached or SAN/NAS? You will likely want to look in the virtual machine's performance tab in the vSphere Client as well to see if you can gain more insight into the resource usage. Task Manager, perfmon, etc can't be relied on to give you accurate statistics.

Good Luck!