Poor VM performance in comparison to Unraid VM.

[wallyo]

I am wondering if anyone can help me debug, I have both UNRAID and prox running.
Server has 2x e5-2699v4; 768gb ram. (HP dl380 Gen9)
Unraid has ryzen 5 3600, 64gb ram

I replicated the same setup I had on unraid as close as I could, but even after a lot of changes and iterations with my prox settings, unraid is blowing it out of the water (at least GUI based VMs? ) using RDP.
The issue is also not limited to just RDP or VNC performance; another issue I noticed was compilation time for the exact c++ program was nearly instant on Unraid, whereas my prox vm noticeably hangs for roughly 5 seconds.

I am wondering if anyone has had similar experiences and knows a fix, or what the issue could be. I feel like with prox being type 1 hypervisor, the results should be opposite?

Would love feedback, and really hoping for some lol

Top video is prox, bottom is unraid.

https://imgur.com/a/xzAn3dv

 

[leesteken]

Ryzen 3600 is much faster per thread, therefore the software rendering (and other mostly single-threaded workloads) on "GUI based VMs" is much better. The two Xeon E5-2699 v4 iis probably be better when you run many lightly loaded VMs for many users: try running 40 Windows VMs at the same time for example.

 

[wallyo]

Ryzen 3600 is much faster per thread, therefore the software rendering (and other mostly single-threaded workloads) on "GUI based VMs" is much better. The two Xeon E5-2699 v4 iis probably be better when you run many lightly loaded VMs for many users: try running 40 Windows VMs at the same time for example.

Totally get that, I also understand memory speed is in favor of the Unraid system as well.

But does that justify that level of performance, just in RDP ? If you wanna say the compilation example that makes sense, but the issue with actually remoting in using RDP to the vm does not seem related? Or do you think both issues can be attributed to that.

 

[Dunuin]

Totally get that, I also understand memory speed is in favor of the Unraid system as well.

But does that justify that level of performance, just in RDP ? If you wanna say the compilation example that makes sense, but the issue with actually remoting in using RDP to the vm does not seem related? Or do you think both issues can be attributed to that.

Without PCI passthrough of a GPU the Win VM won't have any GPU to work with. So without hardware acceleration of the GPU all graphics and video encoding/decoding has to be done in software by the CPU. So yes, high single-threaded CPU performance greatly benefits anything graphical like RDP.
I got myself a similar performing E5-2687v4 and stuff like watching a 720p video in the browser is just not possible because the CPU is too slow. But is working perfectly fine after passing through a GT710.

 

[wallyo]

Without PCI passthrough of a GPU the Win VM won't have any GPU to work with. So without hardware acceleration of the GPU all graphics and video encoding/decoding has to be done in software by the CPU. So yes, high single-threaded CPU performance greatly benefits anything graphical like RDP.
I got myself a similar performing E5-2687v4 and stuff like watching a 720p video in the browser is just not possible because the CPU is too slow. But is working perfectly fine after passing through a GT710.

Both are Ubuntu VMs. Same logic still apply ?

 

[Dunuin]

Yes, no matter what OS you use, the VM can't make use of the physical GPU and all is rendered in software by the CPU. Grat CPU for lots of low demanding headless text-console-only VMs. Not great for everything that needs to be snappy or is using a desktop environment.

 

[wallyo]

Yes, no matter what OS you use, the VM can't make use of the physical GPU and all is rendered in software by the CPU. Grat CPU for lots of low demanding headless text-console-only VMs. Not great for everything that needs to be snappy or is using a desktop environment.

Gotcha , okay.. Using a GPU (have a tesla p40 on standby, wanting to play with vGPUs) should solve the "snappiness" problem ?

I was recommended to check this thread out :
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/hey-proxmox-community-lets-talk-about-resources-isolation.124256/

would this apply in my situation ?

 

[Dunuin]

Gotcha , okay.. Using a GPU (have a tesla p40 on standby, wanting to play with vGPUs) should solve the "snappiness" problem ?

Then keep in mind that running vGPU without paying for a license is at least in a legal gray area...if not illegal.
But yes, should make desktop environments way snappier. For RDP to make use of hardware accelerated encoding you might need to tweek some things and install hyper-v packages.