Windows Server 2016 Server/10 Pro slow on bhyve

[Tino Zidore]

.Hi

I have some windows Bhyve vms running, which is extremely slow while using the Explorer navigation.
When I monitor the resources I see no spikes in CPU usage(1-4 % usage) and memory around 1.5 GB on the Windows 2016 Servers. And nothing to see on network either.


I have tried the following without any luck or improvement:

1. Changing the hw.vmm tunables described below
2. Used RealVNC as well as Microsoft Remote Desktop as client
3. Changing the number of vCPUs from 8 to 4
4. Defragmentation of OS disk

Some facts:
FreeNAS-11.1-U5
2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v2 @ 3.00GHz (20 cores/40 threads)
128 GB RAM
2 x 1 TB SSD mirrored VM TANK

Tunables:
Inspiration:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/bhyve-cpu-vcpu-cores-nad-threads.60169/
hw.vmm.topology.cores_per_package=2
hw.vmm.topology.threads_per_core=2

All windows installation is installed identically:
Example:

VM

• Virtual CPUs: 4
• Memory: 8192
  
• Boot Method: UEFI
• Autostart: true

Devices
NIC

• Adapter Type: VirtIO
• Static Mac Address

VNC

• Resolution: 1920x1200
• All the rest unchecked

Disk

• Sparse zvol
• Mode: AHCI
• Disk sectorsize: 0

Zvol info:

• Force size: unchecked
• Sync: Standard
• Compression: lz4
• ZFS Dedup: off

Temperatures of the freenas server is between 30-40 celsius, and the IPMI interface is not giving any alerts.
It is the virtio drivers 0.1.141.
The Server is only just installed so there is not running anything else on the server to exhaust resources

 

[Rickinfl]

I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm running a monster box like you are, but with 12 regular hard drives. I have Windows 10 running in a VM without any issues and Explorer runs fine. I did how ever need to install the Windows VirtIO driver 0.1.118. That fixed any issues with networking I had. I didn't change any tunables either. Other than that it runs like a rocket. I know this is not an answer just wanted to let you know I'm running a close setup to yours without any issues. Also my VM is setup exactly like yours. 4 CPUS 8GIG UEFI.

Got the information and driver from here

https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/Windows

 

[Tino Zidore]

Thanks, I will try disabling my tunables to see if that helps, and maybe I should downgrade the VirtIO drivers afterwards to see if that is the issue.

 

[Tino Zidore]

It wasn't the tunables there is no difference to the performance without tunables.

 

[Tino Zidore]

This seems to be a rather important line from the link you(Rickinfl) sent:

Windows 10 requires virtio-win-0.1.118:

fetch https://fedorapeople.org/groups/vir...o/virtio-win-0.1.118-2/virtio-win-0.1.118.iso
Later releases have various issues with various Windows versions.

Even though it didn't work with a driver downgrade, so I hope you(Rickinfl) and others have other ideas? ;-)

 

[Tino Zidore]

I will be testing with a new Windows server 2016 install with a zvol blocksize of 4K instead of 16K, to see if that changes anything.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/140365/default-cluster-size-for-ntfs-fat-and-exfat

 

[Tino Zidore]

It did not work either.

 

[Tino Zidore]

I have found sort a solution. It is the RDS Microsoft Remote Desktop for MacOS. When you which to 16-bit color or use a VNC client the Windows 2015+ is much faster.