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So, at work I installed BunsenLabs Hydrogen (built on Debian Jessie, and a continuation of #!)

I need to use a Windows VM to try to use Visual Studio, but I would really like to be able to run Linux as my main OS for the other development I do (VS is pretty much the only thing in windows I need)

My issue is this:

Whenever the Windows guest is doing pretty much anything, it causes very high disk activity (in windows performance monitor, with latencies of 800ms to 10k-ms.) In the host, nmap reports busy% of between 90- 101% most of the time with the VM running.

Periodically the VM will lock up and become unresponsive, as if the disk blocked somehow, and it clears (as expected) after a minute or two. It almost resembles an issue I've had on my home windows computer in the past, where because I didn't have the raid controller drivers installed (even though I'm not in raid or using a raid card) the IO would block and lock up the entire system for a few minutes.

Additionally, the host OS will lag (this happens much more frequently than the VM locking up.) Window dragging will lag, or more commonly typing will lag. For instance, I'll be typing on the URL bar or in something like Skype and it will just stop processing my input, and after a few seconds it will type out what I put in.

To add, and more of a side note, the updates are extremely slow.

It's also worth noting, so far nothing visually lags.

My specs: It's a Dell Optiplex 7020

I have the VM set to

  • 4 Cores
  • 6GB of ram
  • 250GB of thin-provisioned disk space.
  • Running Windows 8.1 Update 1

Unfortunately, I only have one drive, so I can't move it and see if that helps. However, the VM has next to no CPU usage. I've also had this happen when I tried to run a Windows 10 VM from VirtualBox on a Windows host.

To me, everything seems to point to the disk, but I wanted to get a second opinion. I also want to see what people think the solution might be, I was considering trying to get an SSD or two, one to run the VMs on (I have two that I need: an ubuntu server VM run by VirtualBox through Vagrant, and this Windows VM) I'm guessing my Ubuntu Server vagrant VM doesn't cause these blocks because the disk usage is very minimal.

Update 1

HDD status: smartctl -a /dev/sdb

http://pastebin.com/DMh0ycK9

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

Update 2

I don't know how much use this will be, but here's an hdtune benchmark on the guest:

screen shot

At the beginning the busy% on nmon is fairly high, between 85 - 100%, jumping to 101 periodically, even during the points of 0.0MB/s usage. The 800MB/s seems weird to me, and caused no activity at points.

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    Based on the information provided I cannot draw a conclusion if your performance problems are because of the health of your disk. Supply some information that will help us draw a conclusion one way or another.
    – Ramhound
    Nov 4, 2015 at 13:43
  • @Ramhound Can you be more specific as to what information you want? I don't know what information you need to draw a conclusion one way or another. I'd be happy to include it, though.
    – Thomas F.
    Nov 4, 2015 at 13:45
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    What is the health of the drive. Your HDD supports S.M.A.R.T so is the drive healthy or unhealthy?
    – Ramhound
    Nov 4, 2015 at 13:47
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    Looks like the drive is in need of replacement. The multitude of pre-fails & old_age from the SMART reporting are never a good sign. Since you only had the one drive, is there another computer somewhere you could move/copy that VM to and see if you get the same result. I still think it's the drive.
    – N. Greene
    Nov 4, 2015 at 14:40
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    @ThomasF.: The 800MB/sec is reading from non-existent parts of the disk. Whatever VHD format you've chosen is thin-provisioning the disk so parts that have never been written to don't exist, so the driver just returns "blank" values from memory.
    – qasdfdsaq
    Nov 9, 2015 at 13:56

1 Answer 1

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Alright, so I had to do quite a bit of tweaking and experimenting to figure this out. While the disk is a bit slow, and may in fact be going bad, I have nothing really solid to point to that, and don't know for sure (Dell won't RMA it without their software giving a code)

So, to address the VM and lag issues:

Long story short, I had read that people had fixed similar issues by using KVM. So, I setup a windows VM in KVM, and sure enough the issue was gone. I ended up fixing the issue in VirtualBox by going to the VM settings -> System -> Acceleration -> Set the Paravirtualization Interface to KVM or Hyper-V

So, now it's running everything inside and outside the VM just fine.

Anyway, hope that's able to be of use to someone else as well.

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