New to Virtualized Computing O(please excuse my profound ignorance)

I'm running Hyper-V on Win Server 2012 R2. So far I've loaded 2 VMs, Ubuntu and Centos (latest versions of both). I allocated 8gb and 2 cpus to each. Both run very sluggishly. They seem to function just fine but the lag makes them painful to work with. This lag is present whether I remote in or I'm at the server. The server itself is running 2 x Xeon x5570s and 80gb of ram (soon to be 96gb). Can someone clue me in as to what might be wrong?

Thanks

What does your storage solution look like? Are you running local storage? From a NAS?

Local storage. I left the size at the default which is 133gb I believe. I have far more available.

Is the local storage a hardward raid? software raid? rotating / SSD? a single drive?

(note, this is just a theory. I'm really not sure otherwise, usually I play with XenServer / ESXi)

It's a single 2TB non RAID drive. For now I'm just experimenting.

I really don't think that a single drive can handle multiple VMs at any decent level of performance. Have you considered spending the money on an SSD to handle your datastores? I'm running a single 120GB for local storage in one of my VM testbeds

I haven't run them both at the same time.

For 2 VMs, a single drive should be ok. It won't give you the best performance, but it should be usable.

I'm currently running Hyper-V on Windows 8.1, and I run 5 VMs off a single 7200 RPM drive in my laptop. It's usable... noticeably slower when they all start doing something, but still usable.

Have you enabled Dynamic Memory? If so, try turning that off. If your linux distros have Hyper-V support, make sure you're using a synthetic network adapter instead of the legacy one.

Does the Hyper-V host perform OK? If that is having problems (say, missing a storage or chipset driver?), it would be reflected in the performance of the guest operating systems.

Thanks. I check these. The host runs fine. Not sure I understand about the HD. If you only run one VM at a time, would it still be a factor?

You say they run sluggish..are you running the GUI and it is sluggish? I'm wondering if it is just the video display that is causing issues? SSH in and see if they seem to run okay? check top see if anything is hogging the CPU? I haven't used linux on my hyper-v yet (but will be soon)... is there an integration disk for Linux?

I was running a Win2012 from a old scorpio drive with some vms to play with (AD,WDS,WSUS, that sort of thing) ran 'okay' its fine for playing with.

I had a couple spare 2tb Greens i raided in 0 and was much smoother multi tasking and installing.

I then emptied a Agility 4 SSD and put some VMS on it and they run pretty darn good, though i'm limited to SATAII from the board.

In the end, since i'm just messing around i'll probably just use one of the Greens since my little 10 device network wouldn't need it to do much except for updating WSUS.

Deadjasper said:

Thanks. I check these. The host runs fine. Not sure I understand about the HD. If you only run one VM at a time, would it still be a factor?

Click to expand...

Think about putting your OS install on an SSD. How everything ran a little bit better, faster, snapier...

Same goes with VMs. The slower your disk gets, the more sluggish the VMs get. And the more VMs you have, the more disk performance drops.

It's really going to come down to what your acceptable performance is. I doubt you expect SSD performance on your VMs, so you're probably fine.

With that said -- I installed Ubuntu in Hyper-V and it felt pretty sluggish too. On that same hypervisor, I had 5 windows machines that performed fine for me. Shutting them all down didn't help things.

I think it has something to do with the VM Guest Additions... I don't think the drivers native to Ubuntu were working right....

The boot drive is a SSD so I'll give that a try. Thanks