CPU at 100%

[Torpion]

Hello everyone,

I recently installed Proxmox on a Dell PowerEdge R320 server equipped with 64 GB of RAM and a processor:

8 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1410 v2 @ 2.80GHz.

On this server, I’ve set up a pfSense VM, along with other VMs that are behind the pfSense firewall. However, I’m experiencing performance issues related to both the network and CPU.

When I perform a bandwidth test, the CPU usage of my VMs goes above 100%, which ends up throttling the network performance.

My pfSense VM has two VirtIO network interfaces: one for the WAN and one for the LAN. My other VMs also use VirtIO network interfaces. I tried changing the network interface of one of my Windows VMs to Intel E1000, but the problem persists.

I also tried setting the VMs’ CPUs to ‘host’, but the result was the same. At first, I thought the issue was related to Windows, so I installed a graphical Debian VM, but the problem persists.

I can’t figure out what’s causing this issue. Do you have any ideas on where the problem might come from?



Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

Hello Torpion! I would check the following:

1. Make sure that virtualization (Intel VT-x and related options) are turned on in the BIOS.
2. KVM hardware virtualization should be turned on in the VM settings.
3. In case of Windows VMs, you should install all VirtIO drivers and guest tools, as recommended by the documentation.

Like you said, if you are not interested in migrating the VM to another machine, you can also try setting the CPU of the VM to host, in which case it will use all available CPU features for improved performance. But since you tried this already, I recommend to first check my suggestions above.

 

[Torpion]

Hello Torpion! I would check the following:

1. Make sure that virtualization (Intel VT-x and related options) are turned on in the BIOS.
2. KVM hardware virtualization should be turned on in the VM settings.
3. In case of Windows VMs, you should install all VirtIO drivers and guest tools, as recommended by the documentation.

Like you said, if you are not interested in migrating the VM to another machine, you can also try setting the CPU of the VM to host, in which case it will use all available CPU features for improved performance. But since you tried this already, I recommend to first check my suggestions above.

Hello,

Thank you for your message.

1. Virtualization is correctly enabled in the BIOS.
2, Where should the hardware virtualization setting (KVM) be enabled?
3, The drivers are properly installed on the Windows VM.

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

2, Where should the hardware virtualization setting (KVM) be enabled?

Click on the VM, go to Options -> KVM Hardware Virtualization -> set to Yes. However, since you have virtualization enabled in the BIOS, it should probably already be activated.

Could you please post your VM configuration? The PVE documentation shows where to find it.

Also, if you're trying to run top or htop and look at the CPU usage, what consumes the most CPU? I'm just trying to get an overview of the situation.