Capturing performance data - Hyper-V performance counters for CPU and Memory (5 of 7)

Moving onto capturing performance data; the main sources of information are the Hyper-V performance counters as seen from the root partition, there are 21 functioning counters that provide around 600 metrics in total and Vendor products should interrogate these remotely via WMI.

Sadly Perfmon metrics within each guest partition may not be reliable for CPU etc, due to processor skew, so be careful how this data is being used. However certain other metrics can be used and these can be seen via SCVMM.

“In guest” monitoring is very light (as it is in vmware), so process level metrics aren’t captured, so an additional in guest agent will be required.

Now the performance counters

For the CPU, the following objects can provide a useful source of information:

 

•         Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor

•         Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Virtual Processor

•         Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor

•         Processor

 

One important fact to be aware of, if you are monitoring the root partition the processor counter isn’t a Hyper-V counter and will give you the wrong numbers. To accurately monitor how the physical hardware, CPU’s and the guests are being utilized you will need to use the Hyper-V hypervisor counters. The processor counter isn’t virtualized and isn’t aware that it is virtualized.

For the memory, the following objects are recommended:

 

•         Hyper-V Hypervisor Partition

•         Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Partition

•         Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Balancer

•         Hyper-V Dynamic Memory VM

•         Memory

 

These provide a good overview of how the memory is being consumed at the partition level and at the hypervisor level via the Dynamic Memory counters.  The “Memory” performance object also provides some guidance as to the host level consumption.

On Wednesday I'll look at the performance counters for Network and Storage.

Rob Ford
Principal Consultant