I have 5 HP ML350 G5 servers all running VMWare server on Windows 2003 R2 server x64. One of these servers has a guest Windows 2000 Terminal Server with about 25 thin clients attched to it across our shop floor.
When all of the terminal clients are connected to the guest server, the network traffic light stays pretty solid - which is normal. The rest of the resources on the guest are pretty idle. If you run the task manager on the guest server, the CPU is doing nothing and the hard disk is not an issue.
The problem is that on the host sever, the CPU hovers at about 50% on the process for that virtual machine. If I disconnect the network from that virtual machine, the host CPU drops down to idle. If I enable the network again, the cpu stays low until all of the clients connect again, making the network usage go back up. At that point, the CPU on the host works back up to about 50% steady.
Has anyone else seen this happen? All of the drivers are up to date and the BIOS is current. It happens on any of the five servers that I've put it on.