Persona tanking performance?

[Mercutio879b]

About three months ago, we upgraded from View 5.2 to 6.2.2. We started seeing Persona issues almost immediately, and found that our VNXe CIFS share wasn't enough for Persona. I moved the Persona share to an older, but very capable DB server. The share is hosted on 6 1TB 7200 RPM NL-SAS drives, running Windows Server 2003 R2.

Since around the 6.2 upgrade, but more so since the Persona move, many people have complained about slow computers. The slowness comes and goes, seemingly with little reason, other than our login storm in the morning. I've looked into several things, including CPU Ready, Wait, Disk latency, etc, all are within VMware's recommendations. The only thing I could find amiss is that the drive that the Persona share lives on is pretty swamped at this point. According to perfmon the average write queue is in the 20s and the Disk time % is in the thousands.

That's bad, and I know it, but would a slow Persona share really tank performance system wide? Or is this a red herring?

[larsonm]

Persona management issues usually affect logon.  The most common bottleneck with persona mgmt is network bandwidth.  I suspect Windows 2003 is no longer a supported repository for Personas.

When you say the VNX share wasn't enough, where was it lacking?  How many personas reside on your persona repository?  Are you leveraging agentless anti-virus?  Are you using folder redirection for Desktop, My Documents, Downloads, etc?  Have you disabled Client Side caching on the VDI parents? 

[Mercutio879b]

The VNXe share wasn't enough, because it didn't support the Extended Attributes that Persona required, according to VMware. They didn't have any public documentation they could pass along to verify, though.

There are about 200 active users on the Persona share.

Yes, we are using Trend Micro Deep Security in Agent-less mode.

Yes, we are using Group Policy to redirect the Desktop, My Documents, Downloads, everything except AppData/Local, which is for Persona.

CSC has been disabled. The Persona event is clean in the Event Viewer.

[larsonm]

Upgrade VMware tools on the virtual desktop to 10.0.8 or later.  There's an issue with the filter drivers in previous versions of VMware Tools.  See the What's New section fo the release notes below:

VMware Tools 10.0.8 Release Notes

[Mercutio879b]

Funnily enough, we were told by VMware to stay away from v10 for a little while as it's not a good mix with View. We're on the v9.something right now.

[larsonm]

The same bug exists in some 9.x version.

Slow VMs after upgrading VMware tools in NSX / vCloud Networking and Security (2144236) | VMware KB

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=...

Below are the recommended version of VMware Tools if you are running guest introspection services required by agentless antivirus

Recommended VMware Tools version for Guest Introspection in VMware NSX for vSphere 6.x (2139740) | V...

More information on the problematic version of VMware Tools:

Windows virtual machines using the vShield Endpoint TDI Manager or NSX Network Introspection Driver ...

[Mercutio879b]

Good to know. We're not using NSX, but I'll upgrade the Tools before the next recompose.

[larsonm]

Are you are using vCNS, to deploy the vShield Endpoint for agentless anti-virus.

The drivers included with VMware Tools to enable agentless anti-virus are the problem, regardless of whether vCNS or NSX is used to deliver vShield Endpoint.  They are what is likely causing the slowness.

[Mercutio879b]

I'm not 100% sure what Trend Micro uses. I know they are using vShield, I just followed the install instructions.

[h3nkY]

FYI.

There is an performance issue when user login with TrendMicro.

The fix is available in next release, 6.2.3 and 7.x

[Mercutio879b]

Do you have any documentation on that? A cursory Google search doesn't seem to turn up anything.

[ymagalif]

Mercutio,

Just like LarsonM said, do not use Windows 2003 as your file share, that OS is not longer considered robust.

Your average Disk Queue should be between 1-2 max, 3 is considered poor. So 20 is way too much.

How many Disk read and Disk write requests?

Sincerely,

Yury Magalif

[h3nkY]

I quote from 7.0.1 release notes

Release Notes for VMware Horizon 7 version 7.0

"In Horizon View releases prior to 7.0.1, with Persona Management enabled, desktops that have Trend Micro's OfficeScan installed have an issue where logins will be stuck at the welcome screen for a long time."

[Mercutio879b]

We're not using OfficeScan, we're using Deep Security in Agent-less mode. I'm betting that won't affect us.

I understand that Server 2003 is not considered robust anymore, but you run with what you have, and it was the only box we had that had enough storage. We're speccing out a new server.