At home I have a Promox host that I have a Win10 VM running Blue Iris (IP camera VMS). I've had it running for some time now (~year) with no issues. It's a simple setup. All my Proxmox VMs are hosted on a SSD. However, I do pass through two large spinning disks to the Blue Iris VM so that I can record video to the mechanical drives and not to the actually SSD that the VM is hosted on. Those two mechanical drives are only used by the Blue Iris VM. No other VM touches them.
So yesterday I'm in the room where the host is located and I hear disk thrashing. You know, the sound of a hard drive being defragged? That kind of disk thrashing. Lots of reads and lots of writes. This is quite unusual as I've never heard those drives make noise ever. I open up my Proxmox GUI to see what is going on and I see that VM is showing a lot of of reads and writes. Proxmox is showing 50MB/s writes and 50MB/s reads all going at the same time. This is highly irregular. At any given time, Blue Iris is writing no more than 4MB/s (from my cameras to the drives) and reading virtually nothing so 50MB/s both ways is waaay of the charts. So I decide to quickly RDP into the VM and see what the hell is accessing the disk and as soon as I RDP in, the drives stop thrashing and disk access returns to normal levels.
So I look around in task manager and everything looks fine and I chalk it up to nothing and log out of the RDP session. Well as soon as I log out, the drive thrashing fires right back up again. I finally figure out its tied to an RDP sessions after a couple times of logging in and out. Here is what Promox is showing for drive I/O for that VM with my annotations:
You can see from the chart that whenever I'm logged out of RDP, disk I/O is real high. But as soon as I login, it dissapears and resumes normal I/O levels that I'm used to seeing which is about 3 - 4 MB/s write and little to no reads.
How can I pin this down since whenever I log in, the task that is causing the issues pauses and nothing shows in task manager?