Last week I updated to XenClient 2.1 via the OTA like I described in my first blogpost on my findings on XenClient 2.0. After the upgrade I noticed some issues around the responsiveness of my VM so I did some basic troubleshooting and I noticed that although I installed the XenClient tools it didn’t upgraded them, after removal of XenClient tools I did a new installation but the issues weren’t solved.

Because my VM is a VHD from my old laptop I removed all Lenovo tooling just to make sure it didn’t mess around with the XenClient tools, I even removed my antivirus client just to test if that was causing the problem. I couldn’t figure it out so I created a new topic on the support forums:

I upgraded my Lenovo T520 a couple of days ago to XenClient 2.1 and since the upgrade I’ve been experiencing network issues. The problem I see is that my network connection sometimes just doesn’t transfer packages, to load this new thread page I had to wait 6 seconds. Before the upgrade the page would load in 1/2 seconds. I see this in my Lync connection too, a lot of lost connections which didn’t occur before the upgrade.

The XenClient 2.1 Tools are installed, I’ve tried this via wireless and wires but got the same issues. I did a reset of my TCP/IP stack (Windows 7 x64 VM) and removed antivirus (just to test) without any result.

But somehow nobody responded on that topic so I just went on reading and saw that with the upgrade to XenClient 2.1 the default is 1 vCPU while before the upgrade my VM had 2 vCPU’s. I started my task manager and the Citrix self service plugin was eating 100% CPU, when I killed the process my VM became responsive as it should be and that’s why I used the following command to add an extra vCPU:

xec-vm -n set vcpus

Bare in mind that if you have a VM with spaces in the name you should add a before every space. In my case it would be:

xec-vm -n Windows 7 SP1 x64 Inter Access set vcpus 2

After a reboot of my VM I had two vCPU’s but still the process was holding a lot of resources so I decided to go the easy way and removed the self service plugin from my system and now it runs like it should.