VMware Horizon Community
LibRick
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Office 2016 / Freezing Desktops

Hi!

I've got an issue I just can't figure out so hoping someone else out that may have some ideas. Put simply, using Office 2016 causes desktops to grind to a halt. It doesn't happen instantly or after any set of time I can work out. As an example, I moved a user to my test office 2016 pool on Monday morning and she calls up on Tuesday afternoon to say her desktop isn't working. I can remote on to the desktop and open up task manager but that's it. Nothing else works and it's essentially frozen. I can't kill any tasks but wouldn't be sure which to kill anyway as no task is hogging CPU/RAM and no task has gone not responding. The desktop has no signs of ill I can see aside from the fact that I have a black screen and most of my icons are missing and I can't do anything. The only thing that I can do is log out and as soon as I do this the machine goes back to normal.

I tried out Office 2016 last year when I was on horizon 6.2.4 and had this issue. I put it on hold hoping it was a windows update thing and I'm now running horizon 7 and using the office 365 version of office 2016. Exact same issue.

Anyone else had this?

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3 Replies
BenFB
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

We saw this early on with users that only had 1 vCPU and increasing them to 2 vCPU resolved it but we could never explain why. I think we saw this mostly on users using Office 2016 click to run.

LibRick
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Our VMs have a minimum of 2 vCPUs. Looks like we have found the fix. Disabling hardware graphics acceleration in Office seems to have done it.

BenFB
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I had forgotten about that. When they were deploying Office 2016 I requested hardware graphics acceleration be disabled. We later discovered it was not being done for everyone which is likely why we saw the same issue as you. Since disabling it on all desktops I've not heard any reports of that.

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