Beware! Hyper-V rendered the win2k8 machine unusable as workstation. | The Coffeehouse

turrican
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance! - Albert Einstein

Since installing Hyper-V, the machine ( 8GB, Q6600 Quad Core 2.4GHz, SATA-II ) got unusable. The graphics were SUPER SLOW. Sound glitches. Sometimes, the whole thing just came to a halt ( but not locked ) so I had to wait a couple of minutes for the machine for be responsive again. I have all the updates for firmware, windows etc.

I have submitted this feedback to Microsoft.

I know I know, I'm using win2k8 as a workstation but nevertheless! So beware of installing Hyper-V if you are using win2k8 as a workstation. However, it must be noted that the Hyper-V itself worked very good and I was happy with it and its functionality. Even the guest OS worked fine and was very fast, faster than VirtualPC. My problem was with the host OS which became so slow that it was unusable atleast as a workstation.

Cheers!

stevo_
Human after all

What do you mean super slow and glitchy? slow at doing basic 2d? glitchy windows sounds?

turrican
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance! - Albert Einstein

In reply to stevo_

#Jul 18th, 2008 @ 3:40 PM

Yepp,

Sound glitch when playing mp3s for example. The sound sometimes stopps or like a broken record goes into glitches. It's like the CPU is busy doing something but it happens even if I stop the Hyper-V service alltogether.

Minimizing, maximizing windows. Moving them around. Doing VC# compile it causes slowness and glitches. Specially noticable upon compiling WPF stuff, just an empy windows, compile running it is sloooooow and when the window is about to go visible upon run, you can see it in slow motion the fading into the screen ( I have Aero running ).

Even mouse goes into slowness sometimes and won't respond for 1-2 seconds.

Not fun at all. I really looked forward to Hyper-V but I'm back to VirtualPC right now and uninstalled ( removed the role ) Hyper-V. It isn't usable atleast for me personally if it is going to behave like this.

Edit : My CPU is a quad core 2.4ghz , a pretty good gfx-card 8600 GTS and also 8GB RAM.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

You are using a server OS as a workstation.

Resolved: By Design.

turrican
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance! - Albert Einstein

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 18th, 2008 @ 6:46 PM

Frankly, not really. I disagree. For one, having Hyper-V in a workstation is VERY nice. Secondly, even if I was not using it as a workstation, the machine was still slow and glitchy. I'm thinking maybe it was due to my CPU not being a XEON specially made for server or something.

Beside that, I'm very happy on win2k8 : D ...I guess I won't die using VirtualPC instead. hehhe...

Edit : Although, on second thought, you are a "little" right after all. : p

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 18th, 2008 @ 6:46 PM

That is pretty arrogant, Paolo. Just because the main feature-set and target audience, is for servers, it doesn't mean it's JUST used for that.

Look at Win2K. How many people used that for workstation?

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10

See where it says Win2K? There is more Win2K users than there is Linux users.

Win 2k3 is still a fairly popular workstation OS. I know plenty of people who uses it. But also a lot are moving to 2k8. Most of them are very happy about it, in fact.

So what is my point? Just because a person uses a system in a non-intended way, doesn't mean that the person is at fault and should be ignored with your silly argument, when a person encounters, what seems to me to be a bug of a sort, in Hyper-V. It could easily have happened in a server environment instead.

EDIT: Used the wrong word.

ZippyV
Fired Up

In reply to Chadk

#Jul 19th, 2008 @ 12:36 AM

Windows 2000 Professional WAS a workstation.

I have Hyper-V and I don't have any stuttering problems, try updating your drivers.

Ow what do I see here? Another 46.2 MB of updates for Ubuntu.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to turrican

#Jul 18th, 2008 @ 7:12 PM

Xeons are just overpriced Core 2 chips with more cache, they have pretty much the same underlying feature set (for instance, they both have IntelVT for native virtualisation, required for Hyper-V)

turrican
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance! - Albert Einstein

In reply to ZippyV

#Jul 19th, 2008 @ 3:38 AM

hmmm! Weird. I got all the new drivers. I wonder maybe it's a BIOS issue. Do you have a built-in sound btw? and also, what gfx-card do you use? Would be cool if I managed to solve this problem someday. ( I don't like VirtualPC much : p )

ZippyV
Fired Up

In reply to turrican

#Jul 19th, 2008 @ 4:34 AM

I don't get sound in Ubuntu 8.04 and I have an Gforce 8800 GTX but I don't have the nvidia drivers installed just the standard Microsoft VGA graphics driver.

figuerres
???

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 18th, 2008 @ 6:46 PM

So by design Hyper-V will make the host OS slow and have glitches with the display and with audio ?

your words, not mine.

somehow I think your statement was rash, follish and not very professional.

Sabot
My name is Dave Oliver. I'm a Technical Architect.

In reply to W3bbo

#Jul 19th, 2008 @ 4:32 AM

The processor chips are just part of the story Dave. Servers typically are heavily optimised to be computing race-horses compared to workstation nag that is designed to be an expert in generalisation. But all this means very little ... let Uncle Sabot explain ...

The typical server we use for VMware, the humble HP ProLiant BL685 C Class Blade has 4 Quad Core Processors (that's 16 processing cores) and 64GB RAM (expandable to 128GB). Typically we'll get 16-30 virtual machines out of this kind of machine. A monster of a machine compared to workstation but all this mean nothing if one, or more, of the virtual servers is working the I/O hard reducing the amount available to others virtual servers, this will happily bring this bad-boy to it's knees.

Not every software activity out there is suitable to work in a virtual machine and funnily enough I wrote a blog post on the subject of VMware Candidate Selection. I would happily repost it here if it wasn't long but I'm happy to if I get a few yays!

So Turrican go have a look at what your VM's are doing, it's time to get to know Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor. After all you may want to rethink your strategy of turning you workstattion into a VM hoster. Give me a shout if you need some help.

Dexter

In reply to figuerres

#Jul 19th, 2008 @ 6:29 AM

Nah, it was just a very pragmatic statement.

Sound problems? On Win2008/Hyper-V? What do you mean by that, Win2008 doesn't even have the audio service enabled and AFAIK it doesn't come with any sound drivers out of the box Smiley

. It's supposed to be used as a server and no one needs sound on a server so don't expect it to be tested for that.

It's probably much more reasonable to complain to Microsoft about not making a "consumer" version of Hyper-V or for not improving Virtual PC rather than complaining that sound/graphics don't work properly on a server OS.

turrican
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance! - Albert Einstein

In reply to Sabot

#Jul 19th, 2008 @ 7:30 AM

Thanks for the help Sabot. I have removed the Hyper-V role now. However, the virtual machines weren't doing anything. As a matter of fact, even if they were turned off, and even if I stopped the Hyper-V service alltogether the machine was glitchy and slow. I think it's the Hyper-V service doing/changing something. Anyway, I'm back on VirtualPC 2007 again.

Thanks! : )

figuerres
???

In reply to Dexter

#Jul 19th, 2008 @ 10:05 AM

well so far as MSFT and VPC I think when they made it free they made a mistake.

why?

no one can really complain about it by not buying it.

I was in the beta for vpc 2007; when I and others were asking for things to be fixed we were told "no" and "by desing"
I think that if they had to make money by selling the product they would be more inclinned to listen to the customer.

some of the things that were given to them in feedback were:

better USB suport, more than one video emulation option
as two examples.

AndyC

Probably a video card thing. On servers, video card performance isn't really important and so Hyper-V probably don't go out of its way with that. Obviously that's going to be an issue if you use it on a desktop, especially with Aero enabled.

androidi

The emulators.com blog has written in length about hypervisor tech as it currently is if you're into some entertaining tech rants.

http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx19_phenom.htm

Summary: They will certainly slow things down compared to not using hypervisor technology. The hw-virtualization tech is still new to the PC platform and at the moment depends on what you're doing whether it's worth using at all.

Steveshe

This is known issue with Hyper-V and high end graphics. See KB 961661 for details. The story of how I got here is at http://blogs.msdn.com/steveshe

digg1980

I am not sure how related is this to your cause, but I thought I will still pointed out as I seemed to suffer the same affect you are facing at the moment back then. Are you running any Linux guest OS on there? If so, have you installed the proper IC & re-compiled the kernel as required to limit the resources it eat of your system. I have not doing that and running a Linux OS as guest it can be a huge memory & CPU Hog and render you system to be very slow. If you are not aware of how to install IC & Compile the proper kernel for your guest OS you might want to look at:

Install SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 & Component Integration for Linux on Hyper-V

I hope that help if not you in particular, then other readers of this forum who face this funny problem that I had suffered with for 2 weeks before i was able to resolve it.