Hi all,
we are currently experience a very strange behaviour with the combination of Win2k3 (Standard Edition) and Proxmox VE 1.5
Our virtualisation cluster currently mainly consists out of three IBM machines (8 cores / 32 GB RAM each / 2x500GB SAS drives locally) connected to a Thecus 8800 Pro NAS.
Scenario: We need to run a Windows 2k3 VM with Oracle 11g Release 1.
Problem: Massive "performance drops" and slow behaviour although VM taskmanager and Proxmox show close to zero CPU load.
After a move away from XenServer to Proxmox we converted two Win2k3 servers (one running Oracle 10g / one running Oracle 11gR1) to KVM machines. They were running without any issues for month. After a while we were seeing strange behaviour with the Win2k3 VM running Oracle 11gR1. RDP sessions to the machine broke down, exporting a DB to a local drive or simply copying a file from one local drive to another took extreme long. All this without high CPU load in the host or visual problems within the system event log.
The slowdowns were so massive that I decided to set up a new, fresh VM with Win2k3. Already after installation when applying the latest Service Pack plus patches the "fresh" VM seemed to be very slow. Installing the SP took several hours. After tinkering around I found the DMA mode was disabled for both virtual HDDs. I tried to enable DMA but was not able to. Then I decided to give the new virtio drivers for network and storage a chance. I installed the virtio drivers, changed the harddisk type to virtio, rebooted and voila: Virtio for networking and storage.
The bad thing: Same perfomance issues as before. Slow RDP access, copying of local files took several minutes even for small files, launching local programs take very long, etc.
Since I was not shure if the Win2k3 ISO had any problem (taylored configuration, corrupted image) I tried another fresh install of Win2k3 server with another install media. Now DMA mode worked right out of the box. In the first place performance looked ok, after right when my colleague tried to install Oracle to the machine we were seeing identical behaviour:
- RDP access nearly freezing
- Copying a 1.8 GB zip from "drive C" to "drive E" took something like 30 min although both drives are located on the Thecus (4x2 TB HDD in RAID5) connected via a dedicated 1 GB storage network
The VMs itself were configured pretty identical:
2 cores
4 GB RAM
1x HDD 20 GB for OS
1x HDD 80 GB for Oracle
Is SMP causing problems with Win2k3 ?
The strangest thing in this combination:
The other migrated Win2k3 VM (with Oracle 10g) is still running fine without any issues.
Our cluster also hosts a big variety of KVM machines (SLES, Debian, OpenSuse, WinXP) and none of them shows such issues.
Has anyone of you experienced such problems ?
TIA,
Holger
we are currently experience a very strange behaviour with the combination of Win2k3 (Standard Edition) and Proxmox VE 1.5
Our virtualisation cluster currently mainly consists out of three IBM machines (8 cores / 32 GB RAM each / 2x500GB SAS drives locally) connected to a Thecus 8800 Pro NAS.
Scenario: We need to run a Windows 2k3 VM with Oracle 11g Release 1.
Problem: Massive "performance drops" and slow behaviour although VM taskmanager and Proxmox show close to zero CPU load.
After a move away from XenServer to Proxmox we converted two Win2k3 servers (one running Oracle 10g / one running Oracle 11gR1) to KVM machines. They were running without any issues for month. After a while we were seeing strange behaviour with the Win2k3 VM running Oracle 11gR1. RDP sessions to the machine broke down, exporting a DB to a local drive or simply copying a file from one local drive to another took extreme long. All this without high CPU load in the host or visual problems within the system event log.
The slowdowns were so massive that I decided to set up a new, fresh VM with Win2k3. Already after installation when applying the latest Service Pack plus patches the "fresh" VM seemed to be very slow. Installing the SP took several hours. After tinkering around I found the DMA mode was disabled for both virtual HDDs. I tried to enable DMA but was not able to. Then I decided to give the new virtio drivers for network and storage a chance. I installed the virtio drivers, changed the harddisk type to virtio, rebooted and voila: Virtio for networking and storage.
The bad thing: Same perfomance issues as before. Slow RDP access, copying of local files took several minutes even for small files, launching local programs take very long, etc.
Since I was not shure if the Win2k3 ISO had any problem (taylored configuration, corrupted image) I tried another fresh install of Win2k3 server with another install media. Now DMA mode worked right out of the box. In the first place performance looked ok, after right when my colleague tried to install Oracle to the machine we were seeing identical behaviour:
- RDP access nearly freezing
- Copying a 1.8 GB zip from "drive C" to "drive E" took something like 30 min although both drives are located on the Thecus (4x2 TB HDD in RAID5) connected via a dedicated 1 GB storage network
The VMs itself were configured pretty identical:
2 cores
4 GB RAM
1x HDD 20 GB for OS
1x HDD 80 GB for Oracle
Is SMP causing problems with Win2k3 ?
The strangest thing in this combination:
The other migrated Win2k3 VM (with Oracle 10g) is still running fine without any issues.
Our cluster also hosts a big variety of KVM machines (SLES, Debian, OpenSuse, WinXP) and none of them shows such issues.
Has anyone of you experienced such problems ?
TIA,
Holger
