I have seven Windows 2008 enterprise servers running on several VMWare ESX 3.5 physical hosts.All seven of those server run from VmImages hosted onan ISCSI (Left Hand)SAN volume.I've had no problems whatsoever with six of those.They perform wonderfully. I've been very pleased so far with them. One of those, the one I planned to deploy asour File server (and thus installed the file and print server features on) is having major performance issues.Remote desktop connections often timeout, general interaction via remote desktop is very slow, coping files to a different SAN volume is dog slow.Here's what I know or have tried so far. - There is no load on the server. This is being built for production but hasn't been published yet.- All seven of the servers are running from the same SAN volume so it doesn't seem to be the underlying SAN issue.- They are all installed with the same enterprise server 2008 media and have the same updates applied.- The servers performance is still slow whether I move it to a different physical host and other virtual servers on the same hosts run without an issue so it does not appear to be VMware or physical host related.- CPU is non-existent (1-4%)- Disk utilization is alsominimal with little or no traffic since I've not made this a production server yet.- Network utilization averages 20-70 kbps. - There are no page faults, memory is 35% of the allocated 2GB but I tried it at 4 GB and still was slow.- I've tried turning off the firewall.- I've tried turning off antivirus.- I have compared network configuration with other servers line by line and see no issue.- I completely rebuilt the server. I thought the first time that maybe it was due to something I had done wrong or differently in the install or configuration so I scrapped it and did a completely new install being careful to make sure it looked just like the others.- The problem seemed to appear after I installed the file server feature on the server - I'm probably going to uninstall that and see what happens but I can't see how the file server features would impact things. - The performance is completely unacceptable right now which is so strange since the other servers scream.I am stumped. What else do I look for or do? This may not be the right forum but didn't see a performance forum.Any suggestions are welcome.ThanksVerlyn

Found the problem. It was Symantec AV endpoint. Even though I had disabled it during my numerous tests it still caused the problem. Once I uninstalled it completely the server performed just like the other six. The article that pointed me to the problem is this one:http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/100210/troubleshooting-a-slow-running-windows-server-2008.htmlI beat my head against the wall far too long on this one. I wish I had seen the post earlier in my searches for a problem. I'm going to finish putting things back to where I started and reinstall Symantec and see what happens.Actually I should have remembered that several years ago a friend had similar problems with Symantec. It's making me wonder about the use of Symantec.