I'm at a lose of what my issue could be. This is a home lab. I will first start off by saying my nested VM's were running fine the fall of 2017 and sometime from then till spring of 2018. The nested VMs would crawl at trying to boot up. I was running ESXi 6.0 and 6.5. The VMware post at boot would take a few minutes and skip like a video problem (like a video game running on 486 hardware) and then booting up into a Ubuntu workstation or server would take 20min. Everything seemed super sluggish. Something changed during that time period and I just don't know what it is.
My desktop is several years old now, but it was top of the line at the time. Here are the specs.
Windows 10 pro 1803 - OSBuild 17134.407
CPU - Intel i7-5820K @ 3.3ghz (6 core)
Memory - 32GB DDR4
Motherboard - Asus x99 pro
Video - MSI GeForce GTX 970
OS runs on Samsung 850 pro 256GB SSD
I have two other drives that the VM's live on
Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD
Samsung 850 evo 500GB SSD
VMware Workstation is currently on 15.02. I was running v14 code not long ago. Upgraded to v15 code to see if my issues would go away.
The VM's that run on VMware workstation run fine. It's just when I get into the nested VM's that poor performance is happening. Those VM's have 2cpu either 1 or 2GB of RAM. The same as they did when things were working fine.
It seems maybe related to drive performance, because I was testing Nutanix CE and the KVM part of the install checks for drive performance. My SSD's come back at 1000 I/Os or less.
Performance testing shows the SSD drives are great from Windows desktop.
Things I have tried:
I had an Acronis image of my Windows desktop that I restored back before Fall of 2017. That didn't help. I tried uninstalling apps. Making sure hyper v wasn't running. Stopping Avast and Windows defender. All my drivers are up to date. The motherboard isn't supported really anymore. I am on the latest BIOS. The BIOS settings are all set for Virtualization. I even updated SSD drive firmware today to see if that made a difference. I also turned off the Meltdown/Spectre fixes in the Windows OS.
I am almost to the point of buying a new motherboard / CPU to see if that is the issue.
I've looked around the internet for similar issues, but can't find out what is causing my issue.
Thoughts?
