Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server Virtual Machine CPU 100%

[peter_lee]

Hi All,

Background info:

Physical Server: IBM x3550

Dual-Core 2.992 GHz CPU w/o Hyperthreading

2 GB Memory Modules

146 GB SAS HDDs (RAID 5)

ESX Version 3.0.1

1 Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition w/ SP2

Concurrent users: 6

Applications used per user: MS Outlook 2007 and two Internet Explorer 6 windows

Virtual Machine Configuration

2.99 GHz vCPU

4 GB of RAM

CPU Limit: None

CPU Shares: Normal

Memory Limit: None

Memory Shares: Normal

Advanced CPU HT Sharing: None (HT inactive)

Issue: The CPU Utilization on this terminal server VM seems to always be at an average of 95% or higher. The specific process that would take up a good amount of the CPU is iexplorer.exe which jumps between each user. I can't image that this issue would exist in an environment where terminal server 2003 was installed without ESX. 6 concurrent users is a pretty small number for a 2003 terminal server environment. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm sure there are a few tweaks to my ESX configuration that would improve the performance of my tserver VM. Thanks!!

Message was edited by: peter.lee

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Hi Peter, was this server converted from a physical machine? If you terminate iexplore.exe, does the CPU return to a normal level and which user owns the problem iexplore process?

[peter_lee]

Hi Dave,

This server was built from scratch as a VM. There is no specific user that owns the problem since the iexplorer.exe owner changes between all 6. At the end of the day when users have logged off, the terminal server CPU utilization returns back to a steady 5 - 10%.

[williamarrata]

Try this web site. It should give you the information you need.

Hope that helped.