Whitebox very slow / stands still

[Donconto]

Hi,

I installed ESXi (newest build) on a whitebox (i know, not supported...) with a AMD X2 BE-2300 CPU. The installation went fine and i installed a windows 2003 server as my first vm. The installation was very very slowly and the interesting thing is: without any actions on the vm console the vm was nearly stopping. While moving the mouse (don't laugh g), the speed of the vm was fine. It's also the same after installation. While doing any inputs on the vm console, the vm runs fine. Doing nothing: System totally slow. Any hints on that?

Maybe to make it more visual: When the OS within the vm says: rebooting in 10 seconds you have to wait 5 Minutes until the vm reboots. If you move the mouse or hammer the keyboard you only have to wait the 10 seconds.

[nick_couchman]

Could you post some more information, like complete specifications of the host hardware, datastore configuration, and the hardware configuration of the VM?

[weinstein5]

In addition to the information Nick asked for also make sure VMware tools is installed into the VM -

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[Donconto]

Hi,

vmware tools are installed, yes.

Mainboard is some noname with a SIS Chipset. The other Hardware is a Dawicontrol DC-150 ATA Adapter (PCI) and a Intel pro 1000 PT PCIx Ethernet NIC. Harddisk is a VelociRaptor with 300gig and 10.000rpm. 4 GB DDR2 Ram are also installed.

What do you exactly mean with "datastore configuration"? I used the "out of the box" datastore configuration direct after the installtion of ESXi and just created a 160 gig Buslogic SCSI Disk for the VM. Additionly i used 1 vCPU for the VM with 1024 MB Ram. All other settings are default.

In the meantime i found another problem in the message log:

"processor apparently halted for xxxx sec....." Looks like this is the reason for my problem and i think it must be a problem with some kind of hardware. Maybe its the mainboard....

[Craig_Baltzer]

Have a look through the BIOS setup for the motherboard and turn off anything that talks about "power savings", "power/performance on demand", "speedstep" or sleep/hibernation. It almost sounds like the motherboard is setup for a desktop-type enviornment where if there is no input it slows the CPU way down to save power

[Dave_Mishchenko]

How much physical RAM does the host have?

[Donconto]

4 GB.

Power Saving mechanisms are already turned off in the BIOS. Except Cool'n'Quiet, i haven't found any option to turn this off.

[Craig_Baltzer]

The Cool 'n Quiet stuff does all sorts of stuff with the processor that messes with clock frequency, etc. (). With it on VMware Workstation actually throws a warning saying that the observed CPU frequency doesn't match the configured CPU frequency and recommends that it be disabled. Is there a later version of the motherboard BIOS that might let it be disabled?