Extremely Laggy VM's on Poweredge R720xd.

[ewrich]

Hello All,

I've been working on my homelab for a bit and have set up both an R720XD and an R730 in a Proxmox Datacenter setup. I've noticed that on the R730, any Windows VM I throw at it runs decently with no issues. But when I run any VMs on the R720, they can run terribly, like 2-10 fps in RDP or Proxmox Console. The server itself shows no overload on CPU, RAM, or anything, and the configuration is the same between the two servers. But any VM I throw at it runs terribly and almost gets worse if I pass through a GPU to one. I know the R730 has a bit better specs, but the R720 shouldn't be running this bad. Anyone got any ideas?

Specs

R720XD - 2x Intel Xeon E5-2690 V2, 64 GB DDR3 RAM, 1 TB WD Blue SSD for boot drive. RAID 5 array of 3 500 GB Samsung SSDs for VM storage and RAID 0 array of 2 500 GB HDDs for NAS. GTX 960

R730 - 2x Intel Xeon E5-2697 V4, 316 GB DDR4 RAM, 1 TB WD Blue SSD for boot drive. RAID 5 array of 3 500 GB Samsung SSDs for VM storage, RAID Z2 array of 48 TB JBOD. RTX 3060

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

Hello ewrich! Just to be sure: is it only a video issue, or do you have general performance issues as well?

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.
4. In case none of the above helped and 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.

 

[deakus]

Few options to try on the R720 when actively running VM's
1) in the shell run "dmesg" to see if the server is complaining about memory, disc problems etc
2) run "ifconfig <your-nic-interface-name> look for TX and RX errors
3) Hopefully you have managed switch, look at the uplink ports for the R720 on the switch for the same errors
4) Try running a LXC container , just for comparison
5) Log into your idrac and run the Hardware Diagnostics in the lifecycle controller