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deep06Flag for United States of America

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Domain Controller very slow on VM after P2V Migration

Hello Everyone, I really need some help with this problem. Im hoping there are some VM Gods out there.
I need to migrate one of my domain controllers to a VM as a part of my DR plan. I currently have 2 Domain Controllers running on Windows Server 2003 Standard OS. I was able to use VMM 2007 to migrate one of my Domain Controllers (running FSMO) to a Virtual Machine. The process completed without any errors but when I start the VM, it runs extremely, extremely slow. It takes about 6 hours to login to the server. The CPU utilization stays at 96-98% the whole time. The server is completely unmanageable, once I login and click on the Start button, it takes about 5 minutes for the menu to come up. I thought once I load Server Additions it will improve the server performance, at least to the point where it becomes a little manageable, but the server is so slow that at this point the installation stops after a few minutes. Im hoping someone can give me some good ideas to try, or even better, will be able to point out the source of the problem. Thank you all in advance.

Here is what I have:

Virtual Machine Host:
HP Proliant DL 380G5, 2 Dual-Core 3.2Ghz Xenon Processors
24GB of RAM
1T of disk space in RAID5
MS Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP2
MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1
Domain controller VM server is the first one Im trying to run on the host system. No other VMs exist on that box.

Virtual machine to be created off of
HP Proliant DL 320
2gb of ram
80gb hd mirrored
Windows 2003 SP2 Standard

VM-ed domain controller is not connected to my internal network ( I am aware of the danger of having it on the same network with my production DC) its sitting in a separate test environment segment.

Thank you all!
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MattShadbolt

ha, first off - dump Virtual Server 2005!

Are there any messages in the VM's logs? And how is the performance of the server across the network?
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ASKER

The performance of the server is good. I've tried to run other VM's that were manually setup and are not P2V migrations - they work great. It seems the problem is with the VM created by P2V.

Nothing in the logs that  would point out the problem
no i mean how is the performance of the P2V'd server over the network? ie, how is the SMB access? if its a DNS server are the lookup times resonable?
also, if you can stand the installation can you install process explorer and see if anything is causing the hang?
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ASKER

Im sorry for misunderstanding your question. Connection to the host server is very  good, I copied a few files a few gigs in size and it worked great. However, as I mentioned, this server is in a test environment, there is no DNS server in it. This is the first server that Im trying to bring up that hosts DNS and the DHCP services. Since this is a copy of my production DC I cannot bring it up on the production network. Im sorry for this dumb question but how DNS would impact the speed of the VM boot? Im just trying to understand if Im missing something. Also, its not that connection to the VM is very slow, its the boot of the VM is extremely slow, we are talking about 2 hours just to get to the ctrl + alt + del option and once I login, anything I do, takes forever. If I click on the start button it takes 5 minutes for the menu to come up. For some reason my CPU is always at almost 100% utilization. Are there any VHD repair or scan tools that I can use?
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ASKER

One more thing I want to clarify, when I say 100% CPU utilization, I"m refering to the VM's CPU, the host's CPU is just idling.
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MattShadbolt

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ASKER

Hi Matt, you were on the right track. I found out that one of HP Insight agents was causing the problem. I killed the service and removed all HP agents as i don't need them for my DR plan. Thank you for your time.
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ASKER

Thank you for your help.