My top tips for managing Hyper-V capacity.
The key
to success is getting the right data.
WMI access directly to the host provides a view on physical and
partition usage but crucially misses the wider cluster view and lacks
application/process information.
Hyper-V
can capture from Windows and Linux information, so you’ll need to understand
the different types of metrics coming back and what they mean on different
operating systems. In essence, capturing
across the enterprise is key.
Key to monitoring Hyper-V (and any virtualization platform) is understanding the different levels e.g. Cluster, Host, Guest etc
In
Hyper-V the cluster is less clear than vmware with less data available and
different ways of implementing it. You
can have individual application clusters for highly resilient systems, so you
have one or more physical boxes created as a Windows cluster and then you enable
Hyper-V or you may have a particular set of servers ring fenced for key
applications or services.
You could also
group business units, departments, locations etc into notional “cluster
containers” that your Hyper-V admins may have little interest in, but may
provide a valuable source of information for capacity management.
Ultimately, you need to be able to answer
questions such as are my hosts balanced? how much capacity do I have left in
the cluster? etc.
Understanding
how the host is performing and how much capacity is available, look at how the
physical counters are being used and remember to use the Hyper-V aware counters
as well.
For
the guests, understanding their resource consumption when compared to the
overall host/cluster is important and being able to monitor at the process
level from within the guest should assist in application capacity planning and
ensuring adequate performance.
Feel free to ask me questions and come along to my webinar Performance and Capacity Management for Hyper-V 2012 June 20 http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html
Rob Ford
Principal Consultant
