Friday, January 13, 2012

Slow Windows 7 Desktops on View 5 vsphere 5 hardware v8

After updating my windows 7 desktops to vsphere hardware version 8 (v8) all of my users began to complain of VERY slow activity in windows including delays in typing, delays in dragging windows around, and overall general responsiveness. VMware support passed along an INTERNAL KB that explains how to fix this issue, which did solve the issue for me.The following workaround has been verified where you will need to make changes to the .vmx file (the VM's configuration file.)

1. Verify that SSH remote access is enabled in the Security Profile of the ESXi host 2. Connect to the ESXi host with an SSH client with the root account 3. Once logged in, change to the path of the virtual machine folder (for example: cd /vmfs/volumes/Storage1/vmname/ ) 4. In this directory, you should find the VM's configuration file with the .vmx extension.
5. Use vi to open and edit the vmx (example, vi vmname.vmx) 6. Add the following line at the end of the .vmx file:

mks.poll.headlessRates = "1000 100 2"

7. After making the change on the .vmx file, you will need to completely power off the VM, and power it back on so that it re-reads the .vmx (a restart within the OS level will not re-read the .vmx file)

Additional steps will be needed if this applies to linked clones. You will still need to follow steps 1-6 above on the parent VM's .vmx file.

7B. Power down the parent VM
8. Take a new snapshot
9. Recompose the pool to the new snapshot

After the recompose is complete, the changes made should now be applied to the linked-clones.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks Very much for the info - Same issue here and the fix worked.

    Just to note that you can add this parameter using the GUI rather than having to enable SSH mode and edditing VMX files.

    Edit > Options > General > Configuration Parameters

    Thanks Again

    Wayne

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