VMware Horizon Community
dsidler
Contributor
Contributor

Secondary screen temporary freezes when resizing window

This is  weird issue we are encountering as we are testing a new release of our VDI desktop. This is the environment:

Horizon 7.13.0
VDA 7.13 running on Windows 10 Ent - 2004
PC-Blast Protocol
Client is Windows 10 Ent - 20H2
Horizon Client is latest 5.5.0
Client has 2 monitors, driven by NVS510
VDI Session full screen across both monitors

Whenever I resize a window, the remote session freezes for approx. 5 to 10 seconds, including mouse pointer. Keyboard and mouse input during the freeze are queued and executed after the session returns to normal. The problem occurs reliably on the 2nd, right hand monitor, much less on the primary screen. 

What I tried so far:

Tested on macOS, problem does not appear there
Tested with latest Horizon client 2012 build 8.1.0, same problem
Tested with PCoIP instead of Blast, same problem
Tested with Teradici Zero client, problem does not appear there

The only thing that DOES have an impact is when in Performance Options we choose "Let Windows choose what's best ...". and then disable "Show window contents while dragging". Fair enough, but we feel this can't be the solution, because were we live it's the 21st century. 

Does anyone have ideas other then crippling the UX?

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16 Replies
aWanderer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Same problems here. Once upgraded the VDI machine to Windows 1909, this problem came up. With new machines I provision using the 1909 template, things work fine.  Upgrades from 1803 to 1909 are having this issue... can only use one monitor.

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projectserve
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We have the same problem:

Horizon 7.13
Windows 20H2
Vmware Tools 11.2.5
3D Support disabled
No GPU
4 x vCPU
6Gb RAM

After hours of testing we found out that when you disable the Vmware SVGA 3D Driver the problem disappears. (Reboot afterwards; black screen when you are in session)

Also when we disabled the SVGA 3D driver we get MUCH higher FPS, dragging of windows are smoother. (We never seen this much smoothness on our machines?!)

Can anyone confirm this?

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Hmunning
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Can you explain exactly what you did? Disabling the Vmware SVGA 3D Driver would destroy everything, wouldn't it? 

Since the upgrade to 7.13 agent and VM Tools 11.2.0 we have had all kinds of problems with multi monitor setups. The strange thing is that this happens quite occasionally on about 5000 persistent vdesktops. We also had to deal with bsod`s which can be traced back to a too old hardware version. Working from home has dramatically increased the variety of monitor set-ups.

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aWanderer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I tried disabling the SVGA 3D Driver in my machine. Had to reconnect and all was fine. FPS did go up but so did CPU and Encoding processing as well. It did not resolve anything for me. Re-enabled the SVGA Driver.

I found that with 2 monitors and 1 goes black or things are frozen, if I press CNTL-ALT-INS and then click cancel, things worked properly after that. I know, not a fix but it got me through some of the issues.

We're at:

Horizon 8
VMware Tools 11.2.0
Windows 1909

Horizon Client 8.1 (Mac)

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dsidler
Contributor
Contributor

@aWanderer: When we have this freeze, Ctr-Alt-Ins has no immediate effect for us. Only after a few seconds, when the session has recovered, we are presented with the  Lock/Sign Out/.... screen. It seems you are facing a slightly different issue perhaps?

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dsidler
Contributor
Contributor

@projectserve: That's interesting. I tested the same (i.e. disabling SVGA driver) in my session and the freezes go away indeed. We don't even have to reboot or reconnect, just resize and maximize the whole remote desktop window and you're back on. Performance does not feel any different, it was ok already before. But I can't get the session to freeze anymore. Previously I just had yank the corner of any application around to get the session to halt for 5 to 10 seconds, now it does not do that anymore. CPU load seems the same. HTML5 redirection in Chrome works as before, so does VMware Media Optimization in MS Teams.

Now, we had some discussions in our team last year, when one of the VDI engineers insisted to disable the SVGA driver, "otherwise it does not work". We dismissed it at the time because there was no evidence in any VMware documentation that this driver needed to be touched in any way. Furthermore, none of the established optimization guides ever mention messing with the SVGA driver. As long as you follow the order when installing VMWare tools and VDA Agent you should be fine.

Edit: I'm still not convinced that disabling the SVGA driver is the proper solution. There must be another underlying problem here. Any ideas?

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projectserve
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

disabling SVGA driver is/was a temporarily workaround.

Today we tried reverting back to VMware Tools 10.3.10, no more freezing (SVGA 3D enabled)

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

I don't think its used through the client, the horizon indirect driver is used more. I'd make sure your using the product interoperability matrix and making sure the tools version and horizon version work together. I think  you should be fine without looking but I'd double check. Also make sure if your unisntalling and reinstalling tools you should be also uninstalling and reinstalling the horizon agent, it should always be installed after any tools update and change.

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dsidler
Contributor
Contributor

Horizon 7.13 seems to work together with most versions of the tools: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php#interop&260=4718&39=

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aWanderer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

@dsidler Yes, when you are presented with the  Lock/Sign Out/.... screen, press Escape. At that point when we do this the second monitor is no longer a black screen and the session is not froze anymore. 

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aWanderer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Another thought... a procedure we were following at one time was to "unselected" the video driver during VMware Tools install and then when the Horizon Agent installs, it will install the Agents version of the driver.  

 

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Hmunning
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We took a step back.  For our non-persistent vdesktops we have reverted to the VM Tools 11.0.5 . This completely solved the problems, but it is not ideal. We want to keep up with LCM of course.

Unfortunately we also have 4500 persistent vdesktops with VM Tools 11.2.0 . Upgrading to 11.2.5 doesn`t seem to help. In the release notes of 11.2.5 you can read that a problem with the WDDM driver has been solved. This might solve the bsod`s which I solved by upgrading the hardware version to at least version 15 or in our case version 18.

We always install (and uninstall) the Horizon agent and VM tools in the right order and we also clean up a lot of what the installers leave behind. Just rolling back 4500 vdesktops is not really an option. Partly because for now the problem does not occur very often here. It concerns specific multi-monitor setups with this problem.

A few more things :

- Only rolling back the WDDM driver to an older version did not help.
- I cannot find any documentation about the recent VM Tools versions and minimum hardware versions. Upgrading a VM's HW version is not     recommended unless features in the new version are needed. Well it solved BSOD`s for me.
-  We are building a completely new Horizon 8 platform and the same problem occurs here when using VM Tools 11.2.0.

 

 

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dsidler
Contributor
Contributor

@aWanderer "you are presented with the Lock/Sign Out/.... screen, press Escape"

Definitely not possible in our case.

 
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dsidler
Contributor
Contributor

Quick update. We followed Method 2 of this article: VMware View SVGA driver reports newer version than the installed View Agent version (2078739)

Based on that we made sure to have the SVGA driver version that matches our Horizon v7.13, which is v8.16.7.8. With this combination the freezing is gone.

So far so good.

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aWanderer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Excellent... THAT was the KB I was trying to mention 3 posts back there "another thought" but I was in a hurry and couldn't find it again.  That step worked for me too. 

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cworthen
Contributor
Contributor

Just to prevent anyone from having to look at too many different articles to fix this...

 

The issue started for us because we patched esxi and vcenter and a new version of the VMware SVGA driver is included but it does not support Blast / Remote protocol capabilities.  Following Method 2 at the article below resolved the issue.  Note that on certain machines we had to disable the nic to ensure Windows Update did not install a newer version of the driver on step 6.

 

The fix for this is found here:  (at least for us)

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

Steps are:

  1. Uninstall the View Remote Experience package.
  2. Uninstall the VMware Horizon Agent and restart, if necessary.
  3. Uninstall the SVGA driver:
    1. Click to Start > Run, type devmgmt.msc, and click OK. The Device Manager window of the virtual desktop opens.
    2. Click Display adapters.
    3. Select VMware SVGA.
    4. Right-click Uninstall and click Delete the driver software for this device.
    5. Click OK. If prompted, restart.
  4. Uninstall VMware Tools and restart the guest machine.
  5. Install VMware Tools without the SVGA driver and restart the guest machine.
  6. Install the VMware Horizon Agent and restart the guest machine.
  7. Verify the SVGA driver version. 
  8. If you are able to install the correct version of SVGA driver, continue to reinstall the View Remote Experience package, such as UEM and App Volumes Agents.
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