VMware Horizon Community
MatthewDay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Horizon Client Freezes for 3-5 Seconds Randomly

Hello Everyone,

I have been chasing a ghost in my VDI environment for a while now with no success. All of our VDI users (myself included) experience a weird freezing event with our desktops that will happen randomly. The desktop could go days without a freeze, and then do it 3 times in the same day. When the desktop does freeze, I can still move the mouse around but I can not click on anything. Once the desktop unfreezes, it registers all the move clicks and button presses that occurred while it was frozen and performs them all at once. It is very similar to the way a PC acts when its memory is over consumed.

Here are my troubleshooting steps so far:

  1. Since I am able to move the mouse around, that led me to believe it was a problem with the client so I had my users write down the time when the machine froze. With those times, I scanned through all the VDM logs on the physical PC for any logged event at those times. I could not find anything. I even checked the agent logs during those time periods and still found nothing logged.
  2. I called VMware support and had a tech remote into my system. I gave him the time periods of the freeze events that occurred that day and he could not find anything in the logs. He also checked the Connection server for PCOIP drops but could not find anything. I was informed that there was no evidence to declare the problem VMware related.
  3. I installed and configured vRealize for Horizon and monitored PCOIP traffic and bandwidth. Both look good. I noticed that vRealize is claiming that the VDI desktops are over consuming memory. they are running on 4GB and claim they are using all 4GB. However, task manager on the VM's themselves report that average consumption is 2GB. (This may be unrelated but thought I would mention it)
  4. Thinking that the VM's needed more processors and memory, I upgraded the VM's to 5GB ram and 4vcpu's (which is over kill for our usage). 4 hours after the recompose with new hardware specs, I experienced another freeze. I immediately looked at the memory usage trace I had running for this machine and it was holding steady at 2GB.

We are using the latest of everything for software. 5.5 for hosts, vcenter and vsphere. Also running Horizon with view 6.0.1.

Any ideas in figuring this out would be greatly appreciated!

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scythe944
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks I'll give this a try! After fully stopping Symantec I still had issues, so I didn't know what else to try

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tschern
Contributor
Contributor

I'll second packet loss as the culprit here. At least, this is what we've seen repeatedly with our users working remotely with Blast. Poor wireless signal, too much jitter, etc. are all things we've found to make things worse here.

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scythe944
Contributor
Contributor

I almost always blamed packet loss as well, but I (being in IT) have been working from home for over a year and never experienced this problem until now.  I'm hardwired and have good ubiquiti gear at home and I'm having the issue that I've heard my end-users complain about in the past.

Disabling the SVGA graphics adapter in the gold image and recomposing the pool seems to work!  I've tested with both version of VMWare tools (11360 and 11333) and found the problem exists with both versions that have the SVGA graphics card installed.  As soon as it's disabled, the problem is gone.  

What's interesting is the problem only happens when using the secondary monitor.  If you have outlook open on your primary monitor, the issue does not exist either.

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domdsouza
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The trick isn't to find the correct version. It's to exclude the SVGA drivers when installing VMtools. Horizon Agent puts it's version down and that will always match what it needs.

 

scythe944
Contributor
Contributor

Ah, got it. Much appreciated!

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g0dMAn
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I know this is an old thread, but I started having this problem as well.

Horizon 2111
UAG v21.06.2
Windows 10
Mostly PCoIP protocol

I could be in an MS Teams meeting, VDI freezes, but I can still talk in the meeting.  Any keyboard/mouse input that I do while the machine is frozen will registered once it unfreezes.  Interesting thing is MS Teams audio continues to work on my call.

This started happening only a couple of weeks ago. I don't recall any major changes in the environment... no changes to vCenter, to Horizon or the UAG.  Sure, there could be load differences on the firewall, but I'm not sure where to start at this point.

For now I'm trying out the Blast protocol and going to see if the freeze happens without MS teams meetings... do we have any ideas on how to best diagnose? I'm going to look through some logs now.

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jjefferson86
Contributor
Contributor

We resolved this by completely uninstalling the svga driver.  The only issue as far I can tell is working with the parent image is a bit harder since it doesn't resize the display.  However, the performance in the desktops has noticeably increased and, to me, that is worth the trade off.  I understand there is a registry setting we could have used instead, but I'm content on just having it gone completely.

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aperez140
Contributor
Contributor

Updated Horizon client to latest fixed my issues.

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