MS Windows Server low resource utilization

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bjanssen

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Jan 9, 2015
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Hello Forum,

we are a pure GNU/Linux shop but now have to run two MS Windows Servers (one Terminal Server and one MSSQL Server) for interfacing with the tax agency. We run our small environment on 4 Proxmox nodes with about 30, mostly small, VMs and have no problems so far. We have a dedicated node for the MS Windows VMs. The node is a 2x12 core AMD Opteron with 128GB of RAM and 2x4TB SATA DAS. We added the DAS drives to rule out network performance problems while accessing our SAN. The VMs are configured with virtio drivers and run in raw-containers. We added a virtual backnet to the VMs to rule out network latency.

We configured the MS Windows operating system to always use the high performance power setting, disabled all kinds of screensavers and only access the VM via RDP, but since nobody here is a MS professional we might have missed something.

We are confident that the resources are sufficient but those new MS Windows Servers 2012 (not r2) show the strange behaviour of not utilizing the available resources. Everything is runnning rather slow (a process that takes about a minute on a low powered physical computer needs about 3 minutes on the VMs) and of the available cores and RAM only a fraction (about 5-10%) is used. We have IO wait in the <1 range, so we are really at a loss what''s going on here.


Any hints, ideas, solutions?

Thanks and best regards.
 
symmcom said:
How many vCore and RAM are allocated to the Windows VM right now?

It shows low resource usage inside Windows or in Proxmox GUI?
Click to expand...

Hi and thank you for your answer!

We have two MS Windows VMs on the same hypervisor node: one runnning as a Terminal Server (1) , the other as a MS SQL Server (2).

(1) has 1 socket/12cores and 32GB of RAM allocated. The cores are configured as kvm64 cores.
(2) has 1 socket/8 cores and 64GB of RAM allocated. The cores are configured as kvm64 cores.

This corresponds to the recommended requirements of the Sage software running on top of these machines.*

The MS Windows load is around 7% while the Proxmox load is around 20%. Running our tests the Proxmox load for this VM grows to 50-60% while MS Windows load goes up to 12%. Total CPU utilization on the node stays well below 10%. BTW, can somebody explain the percentages? I know how UNIX load is calculated and what load relations are to number of cores but how do the percentages map to that?

We are still all out of ideas.





*We are also seeing a common problem with Sage/Couchbase deployments, too. sigar_port.exe is eating up processes like mad. But that's also true on the physical testbed machine.
 
Are the VM set for fixed memory or dynamic? This makes huge difference for Windows VMs. One of our client have Sage ERP program using MS SQL on Windows Server 2008 R2. This one is much under powered than yours. Fixed 6GB RAM and 4 vCpu. I have noticed that load on Proxmox GUI shows higher than what performance monitor shows inside Windows. We usually go by what Proxmox says, since it is the platform that hosting all other VMs.
I think the hypervisor does more work behind the scene than just running Windows VM thus it shows higher usage.
 
symmcom said:
Are the VM set for fixed memory or dynamic? This makes huge difference for Windows VMs. One of our client have Sage ERP program using MS SQL on Windows Server 2008 R2. This one is much under powered than yours. Fixed 6GB RAM and 4 vCpu. I have noticed that load on Proxmox GUI shows higher than what performance monitor shows inside Windows. We usually go by what Proxmox says, since it is the platform that hosting all other VMs.
I think the hypervisor does more work behind the scene than just running Windows VM thus it shows higher usage.
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks again!

The machines are configured to use fixed memory. We consider to switch the machines over to host CPU type, but we are not optimistic. We are also scrutinizing our physical testbed for differences in the software stack.

But we are running out of ideas :/
 
Hey, I just realized that you are the author of Mastering Proxmox. I've got your book right here on my table! Great book!
 
bjanssen said:
The machines are configured to use fixed memory. We consider to switch the machines over to host CPU type, but we are not optimistic. We are also scrutinizing our physical testbed for differences in the software stack.
Click to expand...

We are faced with a very similar problem on our side as well, so I'm watching this thread with optimism!

Also 4 nodes, the MS SQL Server is on a 2 x 4 Core Xeon with 36GB of RAM. We gave Windows 10GB and 2 x 2 CPU's. There is very little resource usage in Windows Task manager shown and the machine is too slow for the resources we have given it.
 
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