Just curious if anyone knows of a tool that I can use to discover what processes are consuming CPU cycles on our VDI win7 vms. Currently, idle VMs sitting at the alt-ctrl-delete screen are consuming anywhere from 179-389 mhz as reported from vsphere. We have a lot of idle machines, depending on the time of day, so they are consuming a lot of the cluster resources. If I had to guess, it would be mcafee running inside the guest, but I would like to know other culprits. I am aware of the host based virus scanning (i.e., McAFEE Move) but hoping to find some other tweaks with the ultimate goal of increasing VM density and improved performance.
Check for screensaver, All VM's (servers, desktops) should have screensaver disabled / blank.
Screensaver has been disabled through the Win7 optimization guide/tools provided by VMware. Unfortunately, I do not control which software applications are installed into the guest. I would like to figure out which processes are consuming CPU while the desktops are sitting at the ctrl-alt-del screen.
Just for comparsion. I checked the idle cpu load on my vdi desktops --> win7 x64, 6GB memory and 2vcpus.
We use Sophos for virtualization (offload scanning), vmware appvolumes and vmware user environment manager.
All instant clones are very optimzid for performance. I can see in the vcenter view 165Mhz load on each vm.
I don't know if it's possible to lower the idle cpu load. I will check it.
Sorry my fault.
I checked again. For my idle horizon view vms I can see 165mb memory and 30Mhz cpu load.
I think thats a good value. Try to use windows "perfmon" tool. You can connect remotely to the idle vdi and check whats going on there.
I used perfmon and found Quest KACE agent to be the culprit. Stopping and disabling this service brought the average CPU usage down to 29mhz. Thanks!
edit: Also the CPU ready from esxtop dropped from an average of 9% on all machines down to 0.5-0.9% ... wow!