ESXi VM CPU utilization question

[TubsAlwaysWins]

Got 2 VMs that are running really slow. One is Server 2016 one is 2019. Both are running incredibly slow. Im noticing that in task manager of one of them its at 99% cpu utilization (8c @ 2.2 Ghz, 16Gb RAM) but inside the esxi console it says that vm is only using 400mhz of host cpu. Shouldnt they be equal? Any other clue what it is? Ive disabled a ton of serveces, rebooted the os and the hardware.

 

Edit: The other VM has 4 cores available to it. 12C total. Didnt make a difference if I removed cores from one

Thanks

[charlie_root]

My guess is the VM has high steal time if there's another VM hammering the CPU.

 

Also, some servers with redundant PSUs will downclock the CPU if a PSU has failed. Sometimes reseating the troublesome PSU can fix that. May not be applicable here depending on the hardware.

[leadeater]

Task Manager only shows CPU usage in relation to time, how active it is doing things. It's not actually a measure of CPU compute resource usage. However you should not be seeing 99% usage within the OS all the time, something is wrong there.

 

What are the hardware specs?

 

Also in ESXi have a look at the CPU Ready metric to see if there is contention going on and the host is unable to allocate CPU time to the hosted VM. You should really only give as many vCPUs to a VM as it actually needs, there is no reason to give it more and if you are sharing cores between VMs (which is normal) can have a detrimental effect on performance. Always start low and increase as required.

[SteveiJobs]

This may be a dumb question but have you installed/updated VMWare tools?

[Jarsky]

Being new Windows kernels, perhaps make sure that the machine hardware version is up to date as well

If you're running the latest ESXi v6.7 then you should be on machine version 15

 

Also in the VM in question, have you looked at resource monitor to see what process may be involved?

 

[Domrockt]

What 12 Core Xeon are you using?? i did ineed had a bad time with some ES Xeons with a low CPU speeds like 2GHz ish. Heck even with my first 28Core Platinum Xeons @2.2GHz allcore Turbo i had a bad Time.

 

ESXI has some strange reading issues with ES CPUs.

 

How did you assign Your Cores like No1 or No2?

 

 

 

 

[BloodKnight7]

I would suggest lowering the core count of both virtual machines, just use 1 processors and start with 2 cores if it works well, move to 4.... same with sockets, just start with 1 socket.

[TubsAlwaysWins]

@charlie_root  @leadeater @SteveiJobs @Jarsky @Domrockt @BloodKnight7

Sorry for the delayed reply. It ended up being a CPU power saving setting. I don't remember which, but that fixed it