6 hours to install Windows 7 as VM

[NicolaiP]

Hello.

I am having some trouble with creating a VM and installing Windows 7.

For some reason, the average install time is approximately 6 hours, and upon a successful install it takes 20 seconds just to open up the start menu when using the VM, so something is obviously wrong.

I just cannot figure out what exactly is wrong, as the server is running just fine, also when installing OS in a VM (checking with 'htop' while installing).

This problem happens not only for Windows installations, but other OS'es as well...

Are there any logs I can check to see what is wrong?

I am installing to the local drive, and have not set up ceph.

How can I solve this?

Edit:
Server running Proxmox VE:

8GB RAM
Intel Core i7 CPU
500GB sata drive

 

[mattlach]

During your install of Windows, what are your IO wait percentages under the server status tab?

If that 500GB sata drive is a single spinning hard drive, I'd imagine it might be your bottleneck. Hard drives are not fun to wait for even with a single OS at a time, run multiple OS:es on a virtualized box, and they quickly become absolutely dreadful.

 

[NicolaiP]

Thank you for the reply. I have added a new SSD and will try with that.

Edit: IO delay is approximately 9% when installing

How do I make this hard drive available for Proxmox to use?

 

[NicolaiP]

The issue seemed to go away when I used "Raw disk image (raw)" as format during my setup. It did not seem to like QEMU or vmware image format.

 

[mattlach]

Thank you for the reply. I have added a new SSD and will try with that.

Edit: IO delay is approximately 9% when installing

How do I make this hard drive available for Proxmox to use?

Yeah, 9% is pretty high. My mirrored SSD's average about 0.2% at idle, and I have never seen them go above ~2%.

So, you plugged the SSD in, but you haven't yet mounted it or made it accessible?

 

[mmenaz]

Probably your fsync value with # pveperf is very low.
With an additional risk of loosing data, you should set "nobarrier" in fstab options regarding your storage (google for it, or search this forum), this will make I/O with ext4 (default proxmox 4.x filesystem) work much better (compare pveperf before and after, with a reboot in between of course).