Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 and Clickview incompatibility

With the introduction of the dynamic memory management features in the new SP1 release for Server 2008 R2 it is an exciting platform for desktop virtualization. I have been waiting for its release to deploy my virtual desktops in our organization, another key reason for my Hyper-V choice is the amazing pricing that Microsoft offers to education facitilies.

With this is mind I built up my IBM x3650 servers, 110GB of ram each, Xendesktop 5 setup in conjunction with PVS 5.6 FP1 and set to deliver my desktops on Hyper-V.

At the time there was no citrix tools available for building multiple desktops on Hyper-V so I wrote a small powershell script to facilitate this.

I provisioned my two servers, setup 30 test virtual desktops and begun my testing. As per best pratice I used an emulated network adapter to PXE boot my PVS image, then a synthetic network adapter for high network performance once in windows (yes the synthetic network adapter automatically takes preference over the emulated adapter in Windows 7).

My testing was going brilliant and users were saying their desktop experience was faster on this VDI than even the fastest machines in our environment. That makes sense as every modern systems bottleneck is the disk speed and I was using 10 disk RAID-10 arrays on my virtual hosts to provide disk cache for the VDI, not to mention considerable caching on the raid controllers of my SAN that hosts the PVS image.

Things went pair shape when users started using Clickview to view videos, the video was slightly choppy at full screen, but fine in a window. This was only a side issue, as users started getting disconnected from their VDI sessions, users described this as the system freezing. Upon investigating I found that clickview was causing the systems to BSOD, thats strange, why is that occuring? The BSOD messaged were relating to the synthetic Hyper-V NIC driver.

I went back to the drawing board and test the emulated network driver and after a few days testing never had any BSOD, but the performance was horrible. Video was very choppy and even in a small window it the framerate was extremely slow and unacceptable.

I tried a number of different Hyper-V drivers, the most recent, some older versions, I tried without 2008 R2 SP1, no luck. Getting desperate, I reprovisioned one of my servers as Citrix Xenserver 5.6, and retested. Not only did the BSOD go away, but I could now view video at full screen with perfect FPS, no choppy video or audio, no desyncronization, perfect.

For now, it looks like if you want to deliver Clickview on your environment, Hyper-V SP1 is not an option for you...