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Magnus
Asked: 2009-12-24 00:17:16 +0800 CST

Is Windows XP Pro not a good Hyper-V guest citizen?

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On my Windows Server 2008 R2 w. the Hyper-V role, I have these guest VMs:

  • 3 x Windows Server 2008 R2
  • 2 x Windows Server 2003 x86
  • 2 x Windows 7 x64
  • 1 x Windows XP Pro x86

In general, all machines are very fast and responsive. However, the Windows XP Pro guest is very sluggish. It can take up to 2 minutes to connect to the console/or a RD session. Sometimes it can "go into sleep" for several minutes. I have tried to add a 2nd CPU and more memory, but it doesn't help. When the issue happens, it's more or less impossible to get a responsive Task Manager up to analyze which process is hogging the CPU. But I have noticed that it can be various processes; lsass.exe, crss.exe etc.

Integration Services is installed. Microsoft Security Essentials is installed, but I have tried without it, no difference.

Any ideas?

windows-xp

4 Answers

  1. I'd try building another XP machine to see if it's that guest or something odd in the environment. I run in under hyper-v without issue as well

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  2. Best Answer

    The reason seems to be specific to Intel CPUs with stepping B3 or older. In my case, I had on of the older Intel Xeon X3210 B3 stepping CPUs. To conclude; if you want to run Windows XP 32bit on Hyper-V with an Intel processor, make sure you have a newer stepping than B3. (You will need vTPR support)

    Operating systems prior to 2003 Server, which includes XP and 2000, do not have lazy IRQL. When an operating system without IRQL runs in Hyper-V on a processor without vTPR, disk performance is slow. Switching to a vTPR processor makes the problem go away. hughescj and I have seen this. The point is that the solution is not to rewrite an old operating system, but to use vTPR processors.

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  3. Can you remotely monitor it with perfmon? That may avoid the responsiveness problems of trying to launch taskman locally.

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  4. Has the guest always been this way? or did it start recently? If so What canged?

    Was this a P2V conversion?

    Is the XP guest on different storage then the rest? Is the storage OK?

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