The
main focus today is what metrics you should be looking at and the
options for capturing the data.
Let’s
look at the options for capturing the data first. Hyper-V Manager is an ‘out of the box’ tool which is more of a management GUI,
similar to vCenter in some respects but not quite as polished or developed. It
doesn’t really have any performance or capacity aspects, but provides a little
bit of information although not to the same level as vCenter.
System
Center Operations Manager is Microsoft’s management monitoring tool and provides a central source of monitoring for Hyper-V. It is driven by
having Hyper-V management packs and can provide a useful source of information.
The main issue with SCOM is that there are minimal metrics and they don’t
always capture the right level of data for Capacity Management. Although there
is some basic trending, there are no modeling capabilities and there is no real
control over inbuilt aggregation. It tends to be captured with the operational
end of the tool and then automatically aggregated as it’s put into the data
warehouse.
It does provide some monitoring
level support so you can see the Host, Guest, potentially cluster level and
some of the application metrics.
System Center Virtual Machine
Manager (SCVMM) allows for multiple host
management and multiple hypervisor management. The template and library
management allows automatic deployment from templates. It has integrated P2V conversions, a modicum
of virtual machine performance monitoring (from SCOM) and allows you to drive live
migration events. Interestingly it
allows you to manage your VMware estate as well, via vCenter.
Whilst
it does provide some metrics, they tend to be fairly high level and it is more
of a monitoring alerting tool rather than capacity management tool.
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.
On Friday I'll be looking at
these performance counters.
Rob Ford
Principal Consultant
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