Performance issue on TS as VM - Resolution with screenshots

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Performance issue on TS as VM - Resolution with screenshots

Q: We are running Windows 2003 TS as VM on Windows 2012 Hyper-V. Recently, the TS users process the data on the TS is very slow. After monitoring it we found the problem is write cache. We improve the speed by enabling advanced performance (Right click the drive>Properties>Hardware>Policies). I checked all other VMs, the Enable advanced performance is unchecked. Do you recommend us to check Enable advanced performance? What's the disadvantage of enabling it?

A: To improve the performance for the disk, here are some proactively action plans:

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1. Enable the “Enable advanced performance”.

2. Upgrade all the system storage related drives.

3. Upgrade all the storage related hardware firmware/driver.

4. If no improvement after enable the “Enable advanced performance” and the related upgrade, you can consider to contact the hardware vendor to check the disk health.

About “Enable advanced performance”, based on my research, Enable advanced performance can improve performance of storage devices with a backup power supply.

Storage is one of the aspects most often overlooked when you configure a Terminal Server system, and it can be the most common limitation on systems that are deployed in the field.

The disk activity that is generated on a typical Terminal Server system affects the following three areas:

· System files and application binaries.

· Pagefiles.

· User profiles and user data.

Ideally, these three areas should be backed by distinct storage devices. Using RAID configurations or other types of high-performance storage further improves performance. We highly recommend that you use storage adapters with battery-backed cache that allows writeback optimizations. Controllers with writeback cache support offer improved support for synchronous disk writes. Because all users have a separate hive, synchronous disk writes are significantly more common on a Terminal Server system. Registry hives are periodically saved to disk by using synchronous write operations. To enable these optimizations, we can select the “Enable advanced performance”.

Please refer to the following article to gain more information.

http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDQQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.microsoft.com%2Fdownload%2F9%2Fc%2F5%2F9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a%2FPerf-tun-srv.docx&ei=Lb9DUo7DD4qaiQeUoYF4&usg=AFQjCNGdtufM5zlakRrWIW1XK-I_Qbvd2Q

However, if you do not have backup power, it is not recommended to enable it, to reduce chances of data corruption.

Q2: Thank you for the detail information. One more question. The physical server has backup power supply, but the TS is VM. If the physical server has backup power supply, can we say VM is also backup power supply?

A2: About the question, before then I recommended that you can enable “Enable advanced performance” if you have a backup power. Because if we lost power, we will have the chances of data corruption. But in VM, you don't need to worry about it, VM will shut down after restoring all data due to the shutdown integration component.

Q3: So, can I assume it is better to "Enable advanced performance" in VM?

A3: Based on our previous analysis, we can think that it is better to “Enable advanced performance” in VM.

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