Windows – Why do the virtual machines slow down/freeze under Hyper-V Server 2008

hyper-vvirtualizationwindows xp

I have recently installed Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and have 2 VM's running on it.

Everything works fine until some "nice looking" (could be WPF or .NET) application is executed.
In that case all virtual machines hang or totally slow down.

I have read some articles about host slowing down and hanging but my host works, my VMs freeze. I have tried with default display drivers, and with NVidia drivers but no good.

Also virtual display driver have only 4MB of memory? Could this be the problem? And is there any way to increase it? It seems not from what I have found.

My hardware is:

  • Core i5
  • 8 GB DDR RAM
  • NVidia something graphics

VMs are Windows XP x64.
Hardware virtualization is enabled. Hyper-V is up to date.

VM's halt when I star "Acronis true image" or "Avast" Antivirus.

Best Answer

There is a known issue running WPF in a virtual machine. The most common complaint is related to Visual Studio. See this article for a potential fix:

http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2009/10/19/visual-studio-2010-beta-2-editor-performance-fix-running-on-a-virtual-machine.aspx

And to summarize in case the link ever becomes stale, you just need to set the following registry entry to '1':

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration

Note that this will disable hardware acceleration, and so depending on what you are doing you might want to think it through carefully first.

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