Server 2012 in Proxmox VE 3.4

RSI_Security

New Member
Oct 19, 2015
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Hello all,

To begin with, I am very new to Proxmox. I've been dealing strictly with VMware/ESXi as a hypervisor up until we recently got a new client who had an existing Proxmox host that we agreed to support. I had heard and read about Proxmox before then but had never gotten my hands on it. That being said, I'm having an issue with a VM I've recently spun up. The client previously had a server 2003 VM as the domain controller that we're now phasing out and replacing with server 2012 R2. Here is a little background on the environment.

The host is running VE 3.4, and we're working with a very, VERY basic setup. It's just a single host, 24GB RAM with 8 cores in 2 sockets. They used to have more VMs running, but we've streamlined their operations and now they're down to just 3 virtual servers- one of which is what we're replacing. There is no contention for resources between the machines currently.The server 2012 I spun up is in essence perfectly healthy. I've monitored the resources and the RAM and CPU usage never exceeds half of what I've allocated it. (Which is 8GB RAM & 2 cores over 1 socket.) Yet somehow the performance is really terrible. The VM takes upwards of 15 minutes to become usable after a reboot, and even promoting it to a domain controller took much longer than it should have for a virtual machine. As far as I can tell, there's nothing that should be affecting the VM's performance, yet the lag problem persists.

I don't think it's related to networking, the other Windows VM (2003) runs just fine compared to this one. The only difference I can find is that while the Server 2003 VM is using a disk in the qcow2 format, I spun up the 2012 box with vmdk. I did this because it's foreseeable that the client will be getting an ESXi license in the near-ish future. Is this issue possibly due to the fact that I used vmdk instead of RAW or qcow2? Or is the host too far out of date to give proper performance to the 2012 box? Am I even on the right track or heading in the opposite direction?

I'm also new to the forums here, so if there's any other information or diagnostics that you guys need to help me out please let me know. I did do a fair amount of research on this before posting and couldn't find anything quite relevant, so posting here was my last resort. Any advice would be highly appreciated!

Cheers,
-Chris

[edit] Also I'm trying to figure out how to make the post keep my formatting... I didn't type this as a gigantic wall of text, so forgive my newbish-ness.
 
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I've found on, 3.4 at least, that server 2012(R2) is unstable until all windows updates are applied. I've had new builds lock up, give me black screens, etc that once updated have run flawlessly for as long as I've had then running now (my oldest 2012 vm is only 12 months at this stage). I use only the VirtIO drivers (Nic Storage etc) on qcow2 and they have never run noticeably slower than any of the VMware machines here (we also run a vSphere 5.5 cluster). This on IBM x3650 M4 machines.
Cant say I've ever tried VMDK in this environment, so it's possible I guess.
 
Hi,
I would try to convert the disk to raw (qemu-img) to see if this shows any differences.

I have some W2012R2 running without trouble - execpt thats are bloody win-VMs...

You can also take a look with atop if you see any bottlenecks (IO).

Udo
 

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