QlikView file performance on VMware Virtual machine

[#1]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping that someone out there can assist us with a performance problem that we are having with our QlikView server that runs in a VMware environment.

Our .qvw file is 190MB.

The issue is that it takes 27-30 seconds to load our .qvw file when logging into QlikView via the webpage. We have also been able to replicate the problem when opening our .qvw file using QlikView Desktop edition where it takes around 27-30 seconds to open so it does not seem to be the QlikView server service or IIS settings causing the issue.

Some information about our environment:

Dell R720 Physical Server

192GB RAM

All Solid State Drives with internal RAID controller.

2 x Intel 3.5GHz E5-2637 v2 4-Core CPU's

Gigabit network connectivity

VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 1

Virtual Server

Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

18GB Ram

4 vCPU running at 3.5GHz (2 sockets with 2 cores each)

80GB C Drive

VMware Tools installed and up to date

QlikView Server is installed.

QlikView Desktop Version 11.20.13206.0 SR13 64-Bit Edition

We also have a physical server that we have completed some testing on:

Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard

16GB Ram

1 x Intel 3.0GHz E3-1240 v5 4-Core CPU

SSD Hard Drive

When we open the same .qvw file on the physical server it opens in 7-8 seconds consistently, compaired to 27-30 seconds consistently on the virtual server.

The host originally had 2.2GHz CPU's installed so we were advised to upgrade the CPU's to a faster clock speed to get better performance but we have exactly the same performance even with the faster CPU's.

I have been over the VMware host performance in detail as there are 5 other VM's that run on the host but there are more than enough resources available to support the load. CPU sits at around 10% utilisation and Ram is around 40% utilised on the host. Disk performance is also ok with no high wait times or paging occuring on the drives.

I have tested opening the file with QlikView desktop on a different VM that runs on a different Physical machine (similar specs to the Dell R720 above and same version of ESX) and we get the same performance result, 27-30 seconds to open the file.

When navigating around QlikView between different dashboards etc we get very poor performance when compared to the physical machine.

We have checked the BIOS settings of the VM and verified they as correct as per QlikView best practice.

So after all of that my questions are:

Does anyone run QlikView in a VMware environment? if yes, what version of ESX do you have?

If so, is the above performance expected in a VMware environment?

Are there any other settings or things we can test to try and improve the performance before we go and buy a new server just to run QlikView.

I'm keen to hear your thoughts.

Thank you!

Damien

[kdmarkee]

I realize this is an old post, but did you work through your issues?  OR if anyone is viewing this again or for the first time, I'd love to hear what other people have for CPUs, RAM and qvw size.

We also are having issues running QV in a VM, or at least it seems.  In our case, our QV server randomly goes down and we think it is because of resources, however it doesn't seem like there is much activity with QV when it does.  We see this with QV 12.10 and 12.20 and just for perspective, our machine has 8 processors and 48GB of RAM and our biggest QV app is 1000MB.

I've read some old documentation, because that is all that exists and some have said to avoid a VM for QV, or at a minimum QVS.

[Miguel_Angel_Baeyens]

Times have changed since and using QlikView on a VM, if properly set up, does not impact performance (unless it's a very specific bug for that environment).

The past best practices fully apply today: enough CPU and RAM, C and P states disabled in the host, NUMA also disabled in the host (although QlikView Server should apply a setting to mitigate it when installed), disable hemispheres, make vCPUs have 1:1 affinity to physical CPUs, etc.

However, the issues brought by Spectre and Meltdown and their corresponding fixes did have an impact on performance. In Windows and Amazon, the newest patches are on par with previous performance or a bit slower, but not significant in any case. During January - March the degrade was significant.

EDIT: of critical importance as well is the disk utilized, speed and filesystem. Especially with QlikView 11.20, the degrade in performance due to slow disk, in cases of high concurrency was very, very important (server crash). While the virtualization should not impact the filesystem (if it's formatted as NTFS it will be NTFS) the host disk will do (e.g.: slow LUN, high latency network).

[kdmarkee]

Thank you for this info.