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Cannoli
Contributor
Contributor

View 5 Linked Clone Pool - Win7 VM's VERY SLOW!

The screen refresh on a newly deployed View Connection Server 5 and new vCenter Server 5 and Composer 2.7 is unusable.  In 4.6, this wasn't a problem at all!  I saw a thread a little farther down that said to turn off energy savings in the parent VM, but this is already done and 3D is already enabled with 64MB video RAM.

What is the resolution for this?  Users are saying when they type in Word or Excel, the screen doesn't keep up with the key strokes and dragging windows around is extremely choppy.  This is over a 1Gb to the desktop LAN with a NetApp 3240 filer as the datastores for the VM's.  Any ideas?

The hosts are three ESXi 5 hosts with , 24 logical cores and 72 GB of RAM each, hosting 41 Windows7 VM's with 2vCPU's and 4GB vRAM, in addition to the vCenter server with 2 vCPU's and 8GB vRAM and the View Connection server with 2vCPU's and 8GB vRAM and one Linux VM with 4 vCPU's and 8GM vRAM.

Is my hardware over-subscribed?

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Cannoli
Contributor
Contributor

More info, Win7 VM's are 64-bit Windows 7.  I need to double check that Aero is enabled.  This is the same WIndows 7 image I used with View 4.6 but I didn't run any optimization scripts.  I set all the View 4.6 recommendations myself.  I don't recall if Aero was disabled or not as it's been some time since that Win7 image was built.

What video driver should I be using?  After installing the new VMware tools, I didn't change any driver settings.

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tvdave
Contributor
Contributor

We're seeing the same thing too and still looking for a resolution.  Tried the 3D and screensaver thing mentioned in another thread, and I saw some notes about IE9 being a culprit so tried making a pool with with IE8.  But nothing has worked so far.

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Cannoli
Contributor
Contributor

Anyone?  Bueller?

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tvdave
Contributor
Contributor

For more details on our situation, we're only evaluating View and had VMware rep come out to assist us.  Like you, with View 4.6 we had amazingly good performance.  This was on a Dell R710 with "only" 16GB of RAM, but it was enough to provision a couple Windows 7 64 bit desktops for demoing.  For this we used the customized Dell ESXi 4.x installer (whatever the latest was).  We installed View 5 on a Dell T410 with the exact same configuration, Xeon CPUs with 2 socket, 4  cores per socket, hyperthreaded, 16GB using the standard ESXi 5 installer (no Dell customized ESXi 5), and that's when it dragged.  We thought it might be the hardware, so we put View 5 on the R710 where View 4.6 worked well, and the screen responsiveness was also very laggy.  The clients we tried were the Dell FX100 "zero-cleitn" and View 5 Windows clients.  I haven't tried the iPad client with 5, but with 4.6 the performance was also very good over a G wireless connection.

Our Dell servers have only Matrox G200 integrated graphics (which I recall were great around 15 years ago as add-in cards but today can't even support the native resolution of a 1920x1200 monitor), so I'm wondering how ESXi/View renders Aero desktop graphics when typically in a standard desktop environment a more powerful video card is needed.  With View 4.6, the performance on a client was greater than what you would expect if you were to load up Windows 7 directly on the server and used the Matrox G200.  Looking at the system performance with the vSphere client, we aren't maxing out RAM to 16GB either.  Our CPU utilization is also very low, and we haven't put any contraints on bandwidth or anything else.  Everthing is hooked up to an unmananged Gigabit switch.

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Akrietsch
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Do you have multiple Connection servers to try from? If so, is performance bad on all of them?

Immediately after my upgrade to View 5, performance was terrible when connected to my main Connection server. We noticed that it was fine on our alternate connection server. Looking at the primary server, the vNIC on it had gotten messed up. It showed 1.0Gbps and auto-negotiation, but the actual bandwidth was not that. Just trying to copy a 500mb file to it (on the LAN) was going to take3 hours. We deleted the vNIC,which was the E1000, and replaced it with the VMXNET3 vNIC, and everything started working better.The connection server worked fine before the upgrade.

Probably unlikely you have the same situation, but be sure to take a look at your connection server(s) for any issues.

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Cannoli
Contributor
Contributor

It looks like Aero is NOT enabled and I'm unable to enable it because it says the video card driver does not support Aero.  I'm using the newest driver from VMware Tools but I think I disabled Aero in power shell when I was configuring the VM for View 4.6.

Does anyone know how to re-enabe Aero from within the power shell? I don't know what else could be causing the awful video performance.

EDIT: I was able to get Aero enabled and performance still is awful....

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tvdave
Contributor
Contributor

I was able to resolve the issue by reinstalling and making slight tweaks to my process.  Do you notice that when connecting to your VM's with the vSphere Client the mouse doesn't leave the console (requiring a Ctrl-Alt press) or the mouse click's position is off by a few pixels.  With the 4.6 install that had good performance, I noticed console problems until updating the drivers for the 2K8R2 servers.  In the slow 5.0 environment, I also needed to manually update the video drivers but the console and mouse interaction still acted weird.  When I reinstalled, VMware Tools installed the video drivers fine and the mouse behaved as expected and the slow View performance seems fixed.  I'm did a number of things differently in building the VM's in vSphere and not sure which one was the specific reason it didn't work in the first place.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

See if this helps (try in order, one or more):

  1. Use VM with HW version 7 (v8 is not supported for Local Mode anyway).
  2. Appy optimizations manually http://tinyurl.com/8242zzc or using script http://tinyurl.com/848owos
  3. Enable Windows 7 3D rendering for the pool
  4. Configure the maximum VRAM size.
  5. Limit the number of monitors to 2 (if possible)
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darksheer
Contributor
Contributor

tvdave,

Can you please give us more details as to what you did ?

Which version is the display driver you now use ?

Having the same problem on a fresh Vmware vSphere 5 deployment with View.

Regards,

Einar

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ConstantinLotz
Contributor
Contributor

I got some similar issues. I'm not sure if its so slow like in your environment but i'm gonna take some video tomorrow for comparison.


Our setup:

Dell Poweredge M710 Blade 2 Xeon Dualcore with HT enabled @ 2.67 GHZ

Gigabit Network to the Client

Storage @ EMC clarion  san - no problems at all

vSphere 5 | View 5 | vmfs5

Client: Samsung NC240 Zeroclient - Teradici FW 3.4.1

Win 7 32-bit @ 3GB Memory, 1 CPU 2 Cores, grafik set to 128MB memory

Automated View Pool / floated  - 3d enabled - memory set up to 128MB

Windows is customized like http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10157 drescribes.

2 Connection Server - win 2003 and 2008r2

Problem:

It feels a bit laggy, mouse/tastatur interaction is sometimes slow. Startmenu and stuff like that is building up slow sometimes.

We just use Aero Theme  - maybe there is no other way to use classic theme for all desktops ? (Used that makes the lags not so present as with Aero theme)

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tvdave
Contributor
Contributor

Hi, sorry I spoke too soon.  View 5 is still slow!

I thought I had the issue resolved, but apparently not. What I did differently was I created each VM without using the vCenter Converter, pre-allocated each VM's space, and I used the VMXNET3 adapter.  This solved one problem and created another.

When I remoted from home to work on it, the screen response appeared to be much better, so I thought problem solved.  But when I went into the office on the gigabit switch, performance was still not what we got with View 4.6, either from the Dell FX100 Teradici zero client or with the View 5 Windows client on a Windows 7-64 bit system with Intel Core i7 4 cores, HT, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD.

I found VM's using vCenter Converter to install VMware Tools installs a VMware Tools that the vSphere Client doesn't work well with, so you need to reinstall or repair the installation.  That's what was causing my mouse console problems.  By creating each VM independently and not using the Converter, I never got a bad VMware Tools install.

In my new installation I found that when using the VMXNET3 adapter, when View customizes a new machine, it will create a new network adapter and default everything to obtain IP's and DNS via DHCP.  This was a problem for me because since this is a testbed for us, the View Windows Domain Controller it should be using is in the vSphere separate from our standard Windows Domain Controller.  So for each client View provisioned, it would hang on customizing because it couldn't resolve the rest of the servers in the vSphere Domain.  I had to use the vSphere client to go into the console, change the DNS to the IP of the DC in vSphere, and there would already be a prompt saying a restart was needed and I'd click that.

Anyway, back to square 1.  Our initial 4.6 hardware setup was a Dell R710 rack server with dual Xeon E5620s (so 8 cores, hyperthreaded for 16 virtual), 16 GB RAM, and 6 15K SAS drives in a RAID 1+0 Array (3 stripes and mirrored).  Integrated video on these servers is a Matrox G200, which I remember buying 15 years ago as an add-in card.  View 4.6 performance was very, very good.

I installed View 5 on a Dell T410 tower server with nearly identical specs, expecting even greater performance because of View 5's advertised optimizations.  Dual Xeon E5620, 16GB RAM, 15K SAS drives in a two drive RAID 0 array (the SAS controller was lesser, without RAID 5 support), and the G200.

Our trial license for the 4.6 array expired on the R710.  So to rule out hardware, I wiped it and put 5 on it, and had the same performance issues as the T410.  So the same system that ran 4.6 with great performance ran 5 with crappy performance.

Our installed VM's were Win2K8R2 SP1 servers and Win7-64 bit Pro or Ultimate SP1 clients.

Our VMware Rep provided us with 4.6 keys to reactivate View 4.6 and see what happens, but I think at this point the problem is just with the vSphere/View 5 environment the hardware we have.

In none of the environments did we hit the 16GB limit since we were only provisioning a few desktops for trial, so limited RAM isn't the issue.

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griffinboy
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This might be a very long shot, but is IPv6 enabled on your network? I had serious performance/latency issues with v6 recently and had to get rid of it until I can test further.

VCPID: 40118 (VCP310, VCP4)
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JasonV1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What kind of performance analysis have you done? I'm thinking the first thing to do would be to run ESXTOP and just make sure there aren't any bottlenecks out there (unlikely but worth spending a few minutes to check).

I'm using R710's in the lab at work (both 2x4 core and 2x6 core) and they should be able to do 8 desktops/core without issue, 12-14 if you believe the new stats from VMware for View 5 (we don't push things quite that far).

I'd fire up the Dell USC and make sure all your server firmware levels are up to date. As recently as a couple of weeks ago Dell released a new bios for the R710 but I can tell you that there are NIC firmware updates out there as well. Go through the NIC and BIOS release logs and see if any of the fixes apply to you. There have been 2 NIC firmware updates since the R710 launched and at least that many bios updates.

Don't forget to take a look at this doc for some performance best practices: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2011/10/vmware-view-5-performance-and-best-practices-white-paper.html

- Jason

Was my post helpful? If so please remember to award points by using the Helpful/Correct buttons. Twitter: http://twitter.com/jasonventresco Blog: http://vjason.com
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Redbridge
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We upgraded to vSphere 5 this weekend and have just tried to upgrade the Virtual Hardware version to 8, we noted a slowdown on linked clone pools using Virtual hardware version 8 but only when connecting via a View 4.6 client.

When we reverted our pools to use Virtual Hardware version 7 everything was running quickly again

What View Client are you using?

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agarciauy
Contributor
Contributor

Just for you to have in mind, i was having same issue with win 7, cpu was bouncing and reaching easily 100% inside vm. I was looking answers for a week, and solved with the following:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1189

after that the cpu behaviour was really different in a better way. I've done the change in the golden image and then re-create the pool.

regards

AG

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