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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27 Replies
nzorn
Expert
Expert

What type of storage?  Response times?

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MatthewDay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I've got an all flash SAN which is only hitting around 1600 IOPS. Its connected to our VDI cluster via multiple iSCSI connections with jumbo frames enabled.

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mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

Did this just start happening recently?   Any way to tie it down a known change in the environment such as View Upgrade, View agent upgrade, etc? 

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MatthewDay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Unfortunately no. The View environment is only about 5 months old and we have been experiencing this problem from the start. However, we have one user that is running the Horizon client off an HP Thinclient with embedded Linux, that has not experienced the problem. All other users are running on Windows 7 32bit. I'm not sure if that's a clue yet or not. I'm trying to get a few more users on Linux distro's to test that theory. (But this would not explain why thousands of companies are using Horizon perfectly fine on their Windows environments and I cant)

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MatthewDay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Also, I have noticed that when the freeze event occurs, I can click on all the options on the Horizon Client toolbar. I can minimize the desktop, select USB devices, etc, without issue.

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Pooran98
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Are you using any kind of persona management?

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MatthewDay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

No, Persona Management has been disabled.

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MatthewDay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Update, I moved a few users to a Linux distro and installed the Horizon client on those. Those users also experience the periodic freezing. So we can confirm that it is not the host PC or the OS. Again, during the freeze, there are no signs of high CPU or Memory usage on the host PC or the VM.

Still trying to chase this ghost if anybody has any ideas.

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jsabbott25
Contributor
Contributor

Matthew,

Did you ever make any progress on this issue?  We've been experiencing similar issues with our new VDI environment.

Jake

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glennvelsol
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Interesting this was posted because I experience this as well... Horizon 6.1.1 here. But I only experience this with my Dell Venue with the windows client. If I'm using my P25 zero client it doesn't do it. But I see the same issues sometimes where the VM freezes up but I can move the mouse and even minimize the VM session and look at the local Dell Venue and everything seems fine...I always just chalked it up to the thin client causing it or a network lag somewhere. We are also using an all flash storage.

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j_rodstein
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have experienced this before and it is typically two things when the SAN and I/O have been investigated:

1.  Wifi connection on the endpoint devices

2.  QoS on endpoint devices.

If those do not vet out, see if the endpoint has enough CPU/Memory resources.  Also, make sure that you run (or manually apply) VMware's Optimizations for Windows 7/8.1.  Not having these tweaks in place will make a huge impact on performance.  You also mentioned your VMs are using all of the memory allotted, at least from the vROps side.  There are likely services (AV/ other services) running that could be tweaked.  Also, sometimes when you allot too many resources to the VM, it actually performs way worse.  Let me know if you get this resolved.  I am happy to assist.

Thanks!

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kclark2907
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This sounds like packet loss on pcoip or the old issue from 5.1/5.2 when the rx queue would fill up, it doesn't take much packet loss for the screen to freeze for  the 3-5 secs.  Are you able to upload the support logs from a client which has experienced the issue?

Regards

Ken

glennvelsol
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

‌aanyone have any more updates or troubleshooting tips? I started to have a few more users complain of this. I use a P25 zero client and expierence zero issues, but using a Windows PC as a thin client using the horizon client seems to have these mini freezes, just like the original poster.

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Oneboss302
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I see that this is an older post, but was there a cause to the issue found? We are experiencing the exact same issue and have been chasing it for weeks.

Thanks,

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ruboltk
Contributor
Contributor

I have this problem too anyone has any clues ?

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BrockStones
Contributor
Contributor

I had the same issue except it was more frequent and worse. Users would have it happen at least 6 times a day and sometimes last up to a minute. I eventually found a solution however.

It turns out it was due to the fact that we had multipathing enabled in eSXI on our servers when accessing the extremeIO. Once we disabled that things worked fine.

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ksliger_pnfp
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Make sure you follow this document and implement realtime AV scanning exceptions as follows:

• Exclude low-risk files and folders from real-time scans on single-user View virtual machines or RDSH

machines. Some locations include:

– Page files

– IIS log files

– Windows event logs

– C:\SnapVolumesTemp

– C:\SVROOT

– C:\Program Files\VMware\

– %systemroot%\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore

– %allusersprofile%\NTUser.pol

– *.pst, *.pstx, and *.ost files

– %systemroot%\System32\Spool\Printers

– %ProgramData%\VMware\VDM\Logs

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/horizon-7-antivirus-view...

also..

VMware Knowledge Base

I have seen the same symptoms described throughout this thread alleviated by implementing the things above. In particular, we noticed the larger an .OST file was for a user, the longer the freeze. Once we put in an exception this issue went away, enjoy!

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scythe944
Contributor
Contributor

Just started seeing this after upgrading our environment to Horizon 8.2.0-17736878 and App Volumes 4.  I know this is an old thread, but the exact same things as the OP said are happening to us now.  The mouse moves, it registers clicks during the freeze and shows up after the freeze stops.  We're using vSAN for our VDI's with all NVMe cache and storage and our profile shares (cloud volumes) are on vSAN as well.

We're using Symantec on our gold images but only the basic protection (AV scanning only, no firewall or anything).

 

I've already placed exceptions for everything that I could think of, but I just added the pst, ost, pstx, printer spooler location and some others that I didn't have yet.  Hopefully they help.

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domdsouza
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

A similar thread that might help someone. This was the issue in our environment.

 

Outlook 2016 - O365 freezes VM - but only on the s... - VMware Technology Network VMTN

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2078739