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I have a customer with a virtual solution... a pair of session host servers, an exchange server, pair of domain controllers etc.

They reported the servers were misbehaving earlier today.

We couldn't immediately see an issue but noticed that the 'highest active time' on the session host servers is at a near-constant 100% on several of the servers. The HyperV hypervisor itself is also running at 100% highest active time.

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The upshot is that users are seeing horrendous performance via RDP now.... switching between applications is taking an age and even opening MS Word is taking 30+ seconds.

The Hypervisors are Dell PowerEgde R430's connected via Iscsi (10Gb Fiber) to a Synology storage device, which provides the virtual machine storage.

I have other customers also running on the synology storage, and those customers are not experiencing an issue, so I'm confident there is no issue there; but that said I'm at a bit of a loss.

Whenever we've experienced similar issues in the past, either a backup has kicked in out of schedule and the resources are being smashed as a result, or storage maintenance tasks have kicked in. I've checked both of those things and can see no issue.

The compute resource (mem and CPU) of the hypervisors is also well within usual limits...

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Does anyone have any suggestions or pointers on where to investigate next?

I can probably reboot the whole solution this evening and, given that it's a Windows environment, likely make the issue go away, but I could really do with understanding the cause.

Any help appriciated.

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    It sure looks like a storage issue. You even drew attention to it with a yellow freehand circle. Where exactly that issue is, if not the Synology... Have you checked the network? Feb 14, 2018 at 16:26
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    Have you reviewed iSCSI connections to Sinology device? For me, it looks like a network issue. You also, can create some test VM with fixed VHDX instead of dynamic and compare the results. Moreover, check this article as one troubleshooting steps - techgenix.com/troubleshooting-slow-vm-performance-hyper-v-part1 (6 parts)
    – Strepsils
    Feb 14, 2018 at 20:01
  • Everything is pointing at the storage to me, have you monitored what the virtual machines are doing?
    – RickWeb
    Feb 20, 2018 at 17:10
  • Do the VMs have any snapshots? this can have a massive impact on the disks?
    – RickWeb
    Feb 20, 2018 at 17:16
  • I also thought storage, but there are other customers running on that same synology and their machines do not experience an issue. :( There are no checkpoints at all. Disks are dynamic, which I understand can cause a performance hit. I will convert them to fixed disks this evening.
    – John
    Feb 26, 2018 at 9:31

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