VMware Horizon Community
Mike_MT
Contributor
Contributor

View 5 video showing actual performance?

Does anyone have or know of any videos that show actual View 5 performance? I'm doing a little PCoIP View 5 eval project now, and performance is okay, but not smooth. What I'm really looking for is just a few mintues of logging in to Windows, moving/dragging windows around, loading web sites and apps, opening files, etc. - typical office tasks.

Here's what my setup is: LAN, PCoIP (a few different eval systems), 2 dedicated hardware hosts 1) vcenter, vconnection 2) 6-8 virtual desktops Win7 64-bit desktops with 2GB RAM (host has 2 quad core CPUs total of 16 logical processors Intel Xeon e5520 so plenty of processing power). I've got several different Win7 configs I'm testing - hardware versions 7/8 agent 4.6/5, single/dual core, and the only one that seems to perform 'kind of okay' is the dual core virtual desktop.

I've gone through all the troubleshooting and optimizing and as far as I can tell everything is running just fine, but the virtual desktop experience just isn't smooth. No latency issues, no IOPs issues, no SAN issues, no dropped packets, clients will stream 15-18mbs while playing the Windows Media player demo video and I've looped this video without any network issues. ESXTOP doesn't show any problems.

Basically, I think I'm succeeding in finding that there isn't anything wrong with my setup, but I'm not sure what performance should actually look and feel like because the vast majority of videos I can find don't really show basic tasks in practice. They are either marketing videos, how-to videos, or one application (AutoCAD, etc.) videos.

Thanks,

Mike

Reply
0 Kudos
24 Replies
Mike_MT
Contributor
Contributor

Forgot to mention - PCoIP devices are updated to firmware 3.5.1, but I get the same performance using the View Client. I'm reconfiguring a few things on my eval system now and when it's done I'll do a video screen capture and post a link.

Mike

Reply
0 Kudos
Mike_MT
Contributor
Contributor

Well...I've redone my SAN where View sits and it's still laggy, but I don't think it's the SAN anyway. I tried doing a vid capture, but even just dragging windows around the screen causes 100% cpu utilization on the vcpu, so the screen capture didn't really capture a video more like several still pics.

Is extremely high cpu usage (100%) normal when just moving windows around the screen?

Reply
0 Kudos
royberk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I would check two things:

Your master template configured to work well with View

Up the RAM of your Win 7 64 bit machine to 4g.

See if those work.

Reply
0 Kudos
Mike_MT
Contributor
Contributor

I upped the RAM to 4GB, no help. The 'golden' image is optimized with Quest Desktop Optimizer. I'm at a loss...and that's why I'm wondering if the performance I'm seeing is expected for View. The biggest problem is that windows stutter/lag when dragged around the desktop. It's really annoying. I've also tried the desktop client and I've tried RDP with similar results. Adding a second CPU helped, but I don't want to be allocating 2 CPUs for each session and still have laggy performance. Anyone out there have a video to post showing how a View PCoIP desktop should perform?

Reply
0 Kudos
whynotq
Commander
Commander

Hi Mike,

This seems to be a growing issue in the community I'm sorry to say I have the same problem. I have open cases with Teradici and VMware, so far the changes and recommendations have improved things but it is still short of being fully fixed.

What we have done from our base 1 CPU Windows 7 64 bit image fully optimized firstly using quest then updated using the Optimisation Guide is as follows:

  1. Up dated to a 2nd CPU (Helped and got users working acceptably)
  2. disabled 3D acceleration in VIew Pool and set maximum number of screens and max resolution (impoved performance)
  3. Updated the pcoip_server_win32 file with later release from Teradici support (minor improvement)
  4. added mks.poll.headlessRate="1000 100 2" to the VM configuration File (minor improvement in performance but increased general CPU usage)
  5. removed resource pools from vCentre (Improved perception)
  6. set HP BIOS power management for "Best Performance" (improved utilisation)

With all those settings we at least have users working but clearly the fact we are using 2 CPU will impact scalability down the lines. It still appears in the PCoiP session to be laggy when we scroll, drag or resize windows and this is evident within the Guest as High CPU use even with 2 CPU and just browsing using IE 8 we get CPU use up to 80% with 1 CPU it hits 100% however the VI Client raely shows more than 75%.

What else have we got left to try?

regards

Paul

Reply
0 Kudos
tacticsbaby
Expert
Expert

We had slow performance issues too, but we cleared many of these problems by disabling 3D support and Aero 3D effects. We also used the Windows 7 optimization guide to optimize our base images. In our case we used Win7 32-bit. Is the 64 bit version mandatory for you? All in all the main thing that really affected performance was our storage. We used a high end EMC solution with EFD and FAST Cache enabled, that was one of the major factors in achieving decent Win7 performance for us. What kind of storage are you using? Perhaps that is also where you should look in order to solve this. As I remember there is a company called "Atlantis Computing" that makes an appliance that can schedule NTFS reads/writes in a virtualized environment. They claim this can improver performance up to 70%. Perhaps someone can clarify this one. I mention this only to reinforce the idea that storage may be part of your issue. I also wonder if anyone out there has experimented with using host based GPUs or PCoIP accelerator cards for the purpose of improving VDI performance. This is an interesting discussion indeed.

Reply
0 Kudos
tacticsbaby
Expert
Expert

Have you tried experimenting with the PcoIP GPOs that are included? Perhaps you can try tuning the PCoIP protocol to smooth the performance a bit. I think there are some good discussions about this in the View bootcamp videos that were made last summer.

Reply
0 Kudos
Mike_MT
Contributor
Contributor

So I've tried adding up to 4 cores, 4GB RAM, and 1GB RAM reserved...still stuttering/lag and overall unacceptable performance.

I haven't configured any GPO settings since those look like bandwidth tuning settings and I am on a LAN...in fact my PCoIP clients are connected to the same switch as my View eval hardware (and vCenter/vConnection).

May SAN is an EMC VNX 5100 with 15K drives. This View eval is the only thing running on the SAN. vCenter, vConnection, and a few View virtual desktops - that's it. It's starting to sound like Flash/SSDs are required to get great performance, but I have yet to see that in action since I can't find any videos of actual View performance. I probably won't have the budget to add SSDs to my SAN, so I'm about at the end of what I can configure and optimize.

Back to my original post question - where are the actual day-to-day Windows View usage videos? It's starting to seem...telling...that there aren't any out there. Maybe no one is getting great performance so no is posting?

Reply
0 Kudos
royberk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I will try to get a real time video for you of our users experience within View.

I see no such Lag and I dont believe that users are not posting videos because they all experience it.

In WinXP and Win 7 x64 we see regular usage from our users.

Again, Ill try to get a video up for you to confirm that regular usage is expected and acheivable within View.

Reply
0 Kudos
royberk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Video sent... Let me know via PM if you need anything else.

Reply
0 Kudos
tacticsbaby
Expert
Expert

From my experience adding more cores and RAM over 2 GB will likely not have much of an effect. At least that was the case with our View environment. We too used a VNX and it was a very nice SAN. We used FAST cache and found that for operations such as large file transfers and general responsiveness this SAN was really a great performer. FAST Cache really worked nice from a user experience perspective, but I am reluctant to think that you would have such poor performance without it, so you should revisit your base image and look at how much RAM you are using on your hosts. From your description I bet you are not using that much RAM, but you should look at it anyway. As for the Solid State drives I find that these drives really come in handy when you do compose, recompose and refreshes. The SSDs really improve these operations. As far as the usage videos, I wish I had some to show you from my experience. View should be faster than your experience. I am sure that there is something we can find to resolve this issue. Good luck and please provide any additional information that you may come across.

Reply
0 Kudos
Mike_MT
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the clip! Yeah, I’m not getting performance like that. Was that XP or classic Windows 7 interface?

Mike

Reply
0 Kudos
tacticsbaby
Expert
Expert

May I have a copy of this video too?

Reply
0 Kudos
royberk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Actually I sent you the wrong video... sorry. That was XP 64 bit.

I just checked with my Win 7 x64 bit and all aspects run exactly the same minus Firefox. Firefox has mem utilization a bit too high and its not very smooth moving it around on the screen.

However, all other tasks I moved around, minimzed and maximized responded as quickly as the XP machine video I sent.

Opened notepad. CMD prompt. Calendar. My Documents. All except for Firefox responded equally as well.

I will try Chrome on these boxes and see if that has any effect.

Reply
0 Kudos
tacticsbaby
Expert
Expert

I have tried chrome and it worked great with View. By the way Roy, how do you optimize your base image(s)?

Reply
0 Kudos
royberk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Sent it over to ya tactics...

Please do not share it

Reply
0 Kudos
tacticsbaby
Expert
Expert

Thanks again.

Reply
0 Kudos
royberk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I actually did not use the Optimizer, first Im hearing of it.

I used VMWares best practice guide as well as other recommendations online. Paired with known best practice implementations for Windows/Windows 7; to support performance.

Reply
0 Kudos
tacticsbaby
Expert
Expert

In that case I strongly recommend you look at the Windows 7 Optimization guide. http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-View-OptimizationGuideWindows7-EN.pdf

Have a good look at this document and I advise you to take the time to setup and use MDT 2010 to build your base image. In fact VMware includes a file for MDT2010 called "TS.xml" that does the optimizations for you while the OS is being built. I advise you try it out and check to make sure the optimizations that are included are appropriate for your use. They also include a script that does much the same on an already built OS, but I recommend that MDT 2010 approach. Hope this helps.