DL380 G7 - Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V Terminal Server - Poor Graphics Performance

[Martin Schulyz]

We have a client with an HP Proliant DL380 G7 Server which we are having some problems with.

Hyper-V is used with Windows 2008 R2 to deploy 4 Virtual Servers.  The virtual that is causing the problem is the Windows 2008 R2 Terminal Server which has very poor graphics performance when users connect via RDP – the host OS is showing no shortage of resources on any of the 4 Virtuals.  What they see is the screen refreshing which can take 15-30 seconds to complete.

I am not sure if we need any hardware graphics accelleration or a virtual graphics device or both.

Any advice gratefully received.

Regards
 
Martin Schultz
MSTech Computer Services

[waaronb]

What's the network latency like between the client and server? Are you managing any of the client options or optimizing for certain network speeds? From the TS client, those are the things that you see on the "Experience" tab.

Those can be managed/enforced by the server or just left to whatever the client sets.

One other thing you really need to check is the version of the network drivers on the host server. There's an older version of it that caused serious problems for virtual machines. You can either upgrade to the latest NIC drver or disable the VM Queue options... I'm unsure if that had to be disabled on the host, guest, or both...

Best bet is to get the latest NIC driver though. I and others had this exact problem with the DL380 G7 running virtual machines, and even a few ugly issues with apps running on the host machine itself. It acts like it doesn't fragment large TCP packets so it does all kinds of bad things.

There's a thread in this group about the issue so you can search for that and see if it applies.