P2V Issues w/ - Windows 2000 Terminal Server

[breakaway9000]

Hi All

I have a Windows Server 2000 Server running Terminal Services. It serves about 30-40 users. The physical It has a quad core (or 2 x dual core which is more likely considering the age of the system) CPU of some sort and 1.5GB of memory.

I successfully P2V the system to a ESXi 5.1 server, and assigned it 2 GB memory and 4 x vCPU cores.

It all looked good during the initial testing with 4-5 users, but once I got about 10-15 users on there, the system became absolutely unresponsive and CPU usage was pretty much maxed out at 100%. The system was completely unresponsive (i.e. even clicking on the "Start" button produces no response). The only alternative at this point is to shut down the system and reboot it. I had a look at the process list in task manager and I can't figure out what is using all the CPU. It didn't look like 1 process was hogging all the CPU, more of a range of processes (just standard processes that you'd expect to see on this system such as winlogon.exe, crss.exe) evenly using a great deal of CPU causing the system to become unusable.

Where can I start to figure out how to fix this?

The only thing that I can think of is this terminal server allows access to legacy DOS applciations for the users. It uses something called TAME-Mon, which is designed to allow legacy (DOS) applications to run efficiently on multi-processor multi-user systems. Perhaps this is somehow causing issues? More information about TAME here: http://www.tamedos.com/docs/v44/TameDoc.htm

Any help appreciated!

[john23]

Can you check ESX side.. cpu and memory usages for P2V vms.'

Try to provide affinity for cpu and provide 2 gb memory reservation.

[marcelo_soares]

You will need to check if it is a resource starvation. Check the "Resource allocation" tab when you start to see the slowness, looking for swapping/ballooning, and also checking if the high CPU you see is reflected on vSphere host CPU usage.

For Windows systems, check if SMP (ACPI Multiprocessor) is configured on the Device Manager > Computer section also, this may cause some slowness too.

Any screenshots or more detailed information will help on troubleshooting this.

[marcelo_soares]

Also, set hardware acceleration to full on the video driver.