Windows 10 1809 Performance Issues

[Melandrach]

We're in the process of moving all of our desktops from WIn7 to Win10 and we've been chasing our tails trying to figure out why our Windows 10 desktops are performing so much worse than Windows 7. We're using the same storage (All Flash) and same hosts. We have a couple of cases open with VMware but so far haven't been able to identify what is causing the issues.

It doesn't seem to be any one thing, the overall desktop experience is just more sluggish and using more CPU than the Win7 VMs. Edge and Chrome are both more sluggish, opening and editing documents is more sluggish, funny enough the only improvement we have see is with login times which are noticeably faster.

Horizon View 7.5.3

ESXi 6.7 P02 Build 16075168

The two issue I have seen specifically with Win10 1809:

Windows 10 1809 desktops experience performance issues and may become "Agent Unreachable"

VMware Knowledge Base

We are running Horizon 7.5.3 so not impacted by this

Windows 10 1809

windows 10 1809 slow

We are running a later version than ESXi 6.7 Update 3

I'm just at a lost of why performance is so poor and CPU overhead is so high. We even dumped a lot of legacy app installs and crud that we didn't have to carry over from the previous Win7 VMs, we really optimized the templates we used for Win10 using the Optimization Tool and other best practices. The existing Win7 VMs were not anywhere near as optimized as the Win10 ones are.

[sjesse]

Windows 10 in general host move overhead, how many cpus are you assigning to vms. 2 cpu should be the bear minimum, but I only acceptable performancing with 4 vcpus assigned to each vm.

[vBritinUSA]

I don't want to assume that you have seen this before but this is a great guide

Creating an Optimized Windows Image for a VMware Horizon Virtual Desktop | VMware

I've been creating Windows 10 Images (1909) with 3vCPU's unless the client need MS Teams what requires at least 4vCPUs.

Have you checked the hosts for CPU saturation using ESXTOP? CPU ready state is a good start, should be less than 5% to be ideal.

https://esxsi.com/2016/07/10/esxtop/

Do you have vROPS?

[Melandrach]

Thanks for that. Yes we didn't use that exact link, but we still followed almost all those recommendations to a T, with some slight variations in the VMware optimization tool settings, but nothing really crazy.

We are running 2vCPU and 8G BRAM, so maybe that is something we will have to take a look at.

We aren't seeing high ready states though, almost all below 5% except for a VM here or there (Though they do creep higher during our new shift logins). In fact I don't really see any difference when comparing %RDY of Windows 7 and Windows 10 desktops, nothing really stands out.

[vBritinUSA]

I've had it when Windows 10 (1809) native apps have caused me issues and I used https://uberagent.com/ to help find and resolve the issues.

[MaxStr]

1809 was a pretty bad update for Microsoft, with lots of issues. You'd be better off with 1909. Besides that, you're still running Horizon 7.5 agents, and you should double check whether 7.5 is compatible with Windows 10 1809 or even ESXi 6.7 Update 3+.

Either way, I highly recommend that you upgrade Horizon to the latest version to take advantage of a number of fixes and performance improvements. And as other have said already, I also needed to update my vCPU count from 2 to 4 when Windows 1809 was released. You'll also need 8GB RAM per VDI. Windows 7 is over 10 years old, and system requirements for Windows 10 are higher.

[vBritinUSA]

Agree, 1809 was not the greatest and 1909 is much better.