VM Console Sluggish Performance

[mikeyo]

Hello

I'm in the process of migrating from ESXi 8 to Proxmox and one thing i got particularly used to is the ability to remote access the VM via the web browser, vmware workstation or through the built in console available in the ESXi host WebUI. Once VMtools is installed on the VM, display performance is more than adquate for me and I like the flexibility that this offers.

Moving to Proxmox, I would like to know how to achieve a similar level of performance using SPICE/virtGL etc. On my Proxmox host i have the Ryzen 7900 iGPU and tried using SPICE and VirtGL. Whilst the performance is better than VNC, it's still not quite as snappy and responsive as vmware. Are there any optimisations that I can implement to make the performance better?

Thanks.

 

[dcsapak]

Hi,

thanks for the feedback. Can you give an example of what you mean exactly? (E.g. a comparison video ?)
What kind of activity did you test?

Are there any optimisations that I can implement to make the performance better?

there are no real configuration knobs for either spice or vnc really.

In my experience, using some guest controlled remote software (like rdp for windows) works best if you need it often.

also note that virgl does not have windows drivers yet (you did not write what guest os you tested)

also for spice, you have to install the guest tools (via the virtio-win iso for windows, on linux it depends what distro, e.g. on debian based ones you'd use 'apt install spice-vdagent' )

 

[mikeyo]

Hi,

thanks for the feedback. Can you give an example of what you mean exactly? (E.g. a comparison video ?)
What kind of activity did you test?


there are no real configuration knobs for either spice or vnc really.

In my experience, using some guest controlled remote software (like rdp for windows) works best if you need it often.

also note that virgl does not have windows drivers yet (you did not write what guest os you tested)

also for spice, you have to install the guest tools (via the virtio-win iso for windows, on linux it depends what distro, e.g. on debian based ones you'd use 'apt install spice-vdagent' )

Ah, I didnt realise the lack of Win drivers was the issue here. I will try on Linux, thanks for your reply.

 

[dr.schuetze]

I don't exactly know when it started that the desktop VMs started to react sluggish, When i startede last year everything was fine. Often when i changed from on app window to another the respons freezes. The mouse or keybord wont affect anything for minute or so. Closing and reopening the spice viewerhelps. The server consoles work fine. This was not so in the beginning when my win box i7 spice viewer worked fine and all vms behaved as expected.

The proxmox system is on a i9 13900 Lenovo Tiny with 64 GB Ram 2x2 TB ZFS NVME 10 lxc containers 3 server vms (ubuntu) 1 Ubuntu 24.04 VM. I tried mint and debaian CMs to exclude that it was Ubuntu

On the i7 10700 winbox (11) i also have VirtualBox installed with 3 Linux Sytems accesible on demand.
Then I tried to use virt-viewer on any of these VirtualBox VMs to acces the Ubuntu VM and the sluggishness with pauses of up to 1 minute is gone

That is my solution to this problem. I tried it from my bare metal Linux laptops i5 16 gb works also fine with no sluggishness.

I expect that the spice implementation is locking up. The mouse moves but no interaction with the gui visible. When i controlled/observed the behavior by means of the summary page on proxmox or the vm in question no weired spikes in cpu usage og disk/net anomalies can be detected. It freezes shortly in the spice viewer! There is something going on with that implementation release 18.11.2021 x64 version as my best guess,