The small company I work for has two VMWare-hosted machines in the data center of a reputable, well established hosting provider. These VMs are running Windows Server 2008 R2 and are configured with Microsoft's RemoteApps software. There are about ten users logged in to RemoteApps at a time. Most of them are running the same relatively non-demanding Microsoft Access 2010 application.
While using the RemoteApp software, or logged in to Remote Desktop with an administrative account, there are intermittent (a few times an hour) pauses where the session will not respond to keyboard or mouse input. They are typically only a few seconds, but begin to grow both in frequency and in length (as long as three minutes or more!) as additional users log in. They occur on the RemoteApp server and the domain controller.
Our host has told us that this sounds like normal network latency, but increasingly frequent multi-minute pauses make me skeptical.
This peculiar latency is extremely frustrating. Has anyone encountered it before?
Best Answer
It sounds like it could either be network problems (packet loss) or the server(s) that serves your vritual machines is (are) over utilized. Packet loss is easily detected, just ping the server for minutes, an hour or more and check the results. Normally you should have 0% packet loss, a couple of % of packet loss occasionally is not unacceptable. But if you have consistent packet loss something is wrong.
Run a traceroute to see if anything in the path may have problems.
If the server is over utilized, check my answer here: My server doesn't seem to be caching anything well