Only getting 5 fps with View and Wyse P20

[jelbo]

Our setup:

• View 5.1.1
• Windows 7 Pro with 2 CPU cores
• a gigabit LAN
• Wyse P20 zero clients, PCoIP protocol
• HP 1920x1200 displays
• No limitiations in bandwith etc.

The problem:

• Video performance is very bad. Not getting more than 5-6 fps when playing a full screen video.
• This is regardless of the video quality and happens both with YouTube videos and a local .mov file played in WMP.
• There are no drops, there are no delays (<5ms)
• The VM CPU usage is very high during playback. The PCoIP CPU in the P20 is not used for more than 15-20%.

More information:

• We don't have any throttling or limiting policies implemented. When running with the PCoIP config utility from http://mindfluxinc.net/?p=399 I see all counters on 'green'.
• We have the required VMXNET3 hotfix in place.
• We already took the Teradici troubleshooting steps to reinstall VMware tool, shutdown, reinstall the agent, shutdown etc.
• We don't have a 3rd party audio driver installed
• USB file copy performance is also very bad.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

[etieseler]

Did you biuld these desktops from scratch on a virtual platform, or did you P2V them from a source physical desktop?

If you log into the console of the P20, you should have a Diagnostic menu and a Session Statistics option, open this up and what do these stats show?

-Ed

[jelbo]

(of course) we started from scratch.

The diagnostics menu shows exactly the same as the PCoIP config utility I mentioned.

There are no bandwith issues, no dropped packets, no latency. The question is why the VM CPU usage is so high and why the video performance is so poor.

[etieseler]

What video driver are you using in the client? Did you change it or did you just leave it after installing VMTools and View Agent?

I know we noticed much improved performance after making a change here. If you have not done so already, go into Device Manager and check if you have the "VMware 3D SVGA (Microsoft - WDDM)" or a "Standard VGA Graphics Adaptor".

If you have anything other than the 3D SVGA driver, then choose Update Driver -> Browse My Computer.

In the path, browser to %Drive Letter%\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers

Check Include Subfolders

And click Let Me Pick...

Choose that 3D SVGA driver.

Also, after you change this and reboot, shutdown the VM and edit settings and increase the Video RAM to 64 or 128MB.

Like I said, we noticed a much improved video performance after doing this, although I never noticed the CPU usage being very high to begin with.

-Ed

[jelbo]

We have the "VMware 3D SVGA (Microsoft - WDDM)" driver.

Originally we had 3D disabled both on the pool and in the VM properties. I now enabled it and re-tested with Aero enabled and 128 MB video memory configured.

Unfortunately there is no difference. Both when playing a video and when using the Aero Flip shortcut (Win+Tab) the animations are horribly slow.

From a network side nothing looks wrong; the issue also happens when a device is plugged into the same Cisco switch as the host server and the connection server VM. But when making the window smaller than 1920x1200 the CPU usage drops and the framerate is better, but to get a 30fps frame rate I need to make the video window not bigger than about 8 cm / 3 inch  wide and 5 cm / 2 inch high.

[etieseler]

Thats very odd. So what kind of hardware do your ESX hosts run on and what version of ESX?

Has it all been verified to be compatable here http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

When you say the VM CPU usage is high, is that as reported in the VI client or Task manager, or both?

[jelbo]

We have Cisco UCS C200 series servers and a NetApp FAS 3140 SAN, using NFS to mount the datastores to the UCS hosts. Networking components are Cisco 3750 and 2960, all gigabit. VMware is Enterprise Plus 5.0, and View 5.1.1 is installed. The client side is Wyse P20 with HP 2440w monitors, 1920x1200.

I don't think there is anything exotic or unsupported.

The CPU usage is seen in the VM in Task Manager. The CPU in the P20 doesn't exceed about 20% of its capacity.

[etieseler]

What do the Performance Charts look like for that VM in the VI Client, is there anything out of the ordinary?

Also, how is the video performance when you open the VM using the VI Client Console? How about RDP? You can't really see FPS, but you can tell if its working better or not.

Check your vSwitch properties if you are teaming your NIC's. Select edit on your vSwitch and click the NIC Teaming tab. For Network Failover Detection is Beacon Probing enabled? If so change it to Link Status Only.

http://techsupport.teradici.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=15164

Ed

[jelbo]

There are some CPU spikes in the performance charts but furthermore nothing strange.

I checked the setting in the vswitch and it already set to Link Status Only.

What I tried as well:

• Via RDP the video plays more smooth but it isn't sharp anymore;
• Via the console of the VI client the performance is as bad as via PCoIP;
• There is no difference in framerate between a Wyse P20 and a View client on a regular desktop PC;
• The VMware 3D video driver has version 7.14.1.1080. Using version 7.14.1.1070 does not make a difference.
• Enabling or disabling 3D does not make a difference.
• We have 1 CPU with 2 cores in the Win7 VM configured. Adding another CPU doesn't make it better. Removing 1 core doesn't help either.

[etieseler]

Well getting that same poor performance via the console in the VI client tells us a lot. It has nothing to do with PCoIP or the network to the client.

Check out your storage. You said you had NFS backend, is that physically segregated on a different network or is it mixed with the rest of the network traffic? Look deeply into it, check out the storage adaptor queues, the backend network load. I believe you can see storage latencies in esxtop (hardware, network, and software latencies).

Thats the only thing that is questionable, your CPU's should be fine, I assume you have enough RAM on your ESX hosts so there is no swapping or ballooning right? The network (to the client) and PCoIP are of no concern considering you get that bad performance directly on the console.

Storage is perhaps the most important part of View, and if you have problems there it will bleed into all parts of the virtual desktop, including poor video performance. I read a few months back that storage issues can cause your virtual desktop to consume more CPU than it normally should, which I believe you said is happening?

Ed

[LeMoyne]

We're in the exact same boat with poor video performance regardless of the endpoint, and via the console.  Our View deployment runs on top of a Dell Equallogic XVS SAN array.

Have you had any luck with a resolution?

Thanks!

-PHIL

[etieseler]

I wondered if he got the issue resovled as well. I wonder what the actual problem was. Out of curiosity, do you have any other VM's sharing the host with the VM with poor video performance? If so, do they all have the same poor video quality? I just found a problem that eventually caused fairly severe lag in the video of all our VM's, it was a network issue where there were significant CRC errors, this affected the PCoIP/RDP sessions significantly and the Console not so much... but that was only because I was connecting to the console over this link with the CRC errors.

[LeMoyne]

I think our problem lies on the storage layer as we've just about ruled everything else out, though I will ask our network guys to look for CRC errors as you've described.  Thanks!