Someone call the n00b patrol because this one should have been a no-brainer. I was working with a customer today and their default image inside of vCloud Director is a Windows 2008 R2 VM with 1vCPU and 4GB of RAM. Whenever they deployed a new VM from vCloud Director, it would take approximately 45 minutes to complete the entire sysprep process and boot up. After that 45 minute process, when they tried to use that VM, it was almost unbearable through the web UI because it was so slow. The CPU performance was just outright horrible.
After a few quick conversations, I did a bit of troubleshooting to narrow it down to a vCloud problem. I used the same exact image and deployed it from template on a blade used for vCloud resources. It also deployed on the same datastore so we could cancel out the hardware issue. Sysprep ran, and the VM was created and ready for use after 4-7 minutes. So it was definitely a problem in vCloud.
I opened up the vSphere Client to the vCloud vCenter and started looking at the VM that was spun up from vCloud Director under the resources tab. This should have been as clear as day to point out. The VM has a limit set on it of 260MHz.
The notion of giving organizations access to provider vDCs is so they consume only as much as they need or want to use. By default, when creating an Organization vDC and assigning a Provider vDC to it, the default setting is that it can only consume "0.26GHz" of CPU, or 260MHz. Which 260MHz isn't near enough for a 2008 R2 VM.
To fix this, simply set this setting to something much higher. This setting depends on the speed of your underlying processor. So if you have a 12 cores and a processor speed of 3.36GHz, that means a VM with a single vCPU running a single threaded application, can only consume 3.36GHz (theoretically). But the more vCPUs and the more threaded applications may need more CPU power. The setting defines what a SINGLE vCPU will consume, not the aggregated amount among multiple vCPUs on a single VM. So 2vCPUs will take a the setting and multiply it by 2. To change the setting, make sure you do it during the Organization vDC creation, or if they are created already, simply right click on the Organization vDC and go to Properties.
Highlight the vCPU Speed setting and change it to something higher based on your chargeback model. Since I wanted to set it and forget it, and I'm not running a chargeback model for CPU consumption, I just set it to 5GHz. Click OK. You may want to set this to something lower depending on your tenants and their needs. Since CPU is hardly a constraint for people (RAM is), you may only be charging for RAM in your chargeback model. But if you charge for CPU, and you want to make sure that particular Org vDC doesn't over consume, you will want to change it to something below your single core clock speed.
Now, when you Power Off and Power On your vApp, there will be a new limit of 5GHz set on the VM.
