I have a customer that uses a big line of business app that is written in Visual FoxPro 9 (VFP9). The application ran very well in a Server 2008 terminal server VM on top of VMware ESXi 5.1 on a Dell T610 with 15K drives in a RAID10 behind a Dell H700 controller (VM was in the RAID10).
We have migrated the customer out of the ESXi environment onto Hyper-V on top of Server 2012 R2. Net-new terminal server built as a Server 2012 R2 VM on top of new Server 2012 R2 host (Dell T620 with 15K drives in a RAID 10 behind Dell H710p controller). Host was originally built with a Tiered Storage Space that included all of the 15K drives plus dual enterprise SSD's but I have backed that out. The application vendor migrated the VFP9 application to the new server and did whatever they needed to do to get the app installed.
The application runs but it is, to put it mildly, a dog in this environment. Lookups that took less than a second in the old 2008/ESXi environment can take between 5 and 10 seconds on the new host. All other applications fly on the new terminal server VM, just the VFP9 app is doggy. I have tried many things to sort out the problem including running all required VFP maintenance (reindex, repair and pack files) with not much to show for it. I have rebuilt the underlying RAID10 with differeing stripe sizes, again with no real effect on VFP on way or the other. I have migrated the VM to other Hyper-V hosts (the T610 has been rebuilt as a 2012 R2 host) and noted similar performance issues.
The app vendor are useless in helping diagnose the problem. They say the app runs fine under Server 2012 R2 but they only have it running in a physical environment (and I've not actually seen the app run so I have to take them at their word). I have had to remind them that the original terminal server was also virtualized and did not have issues.
I'd be interested in knowing if anyone else has seen similar behaviour in older apps under 2012 R2 an Hyper-V and, specifically, if anyone has seen this issue with VFP apps? I am willing to try anything at this point including migrating back to ESXi but I'd rather sort out the issue in the current environment. Any comments, insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Robert Dick, Office365 MVP
Robert Dick Office 365 MVP