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
- 4C / 8T Intel i7 4790 @ 3.6Ghz
- 24GB DDR3 RAM (we upgraded the RAM)
- 500GB HDD (model: ST500DM002 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148767)
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
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:
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.