Measuring Total CPU Utilization on Hyper-V

ToddMuirhead — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:11:00 GMT

I just finished up testing for a new whitepaper on Hyper-V performance and one of the initial things I had to figure out was how to measure the CPU utilization on the server. What is known as the parent partition (the initial Windows Server 2008 that is installed on the server and then used to enable the Hyper-V role) does not include the CPU utilization for its VMs in the main Processor Utilization performance counter. This was surprising to me at first, but makes sense when you consider the architecture of Hyper-V. In this architecture, the VMs do not go through the parent partition to access the processors. (Although I/O does to use the device drivers of the parent partition.)

In order to solve this problem Microsoft has created some new performance counters that are specific to the Hyper-V Hypervisor. Early on in the betas for Hyper-V it wasn't clear what these counters did, as I blogged about back in January, but it is now much clearer with some guides from Microsoft.

In order to measure the total CPU utilization on a Windows Server 2008 system running VMs under Hyper-V use the Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor % Total Run Time counter in Performance Monitor (more affectionately known as perfmon). If you just look at the % CPU Utilization or the performance tab of Task Manager you will only see the CPU utilization of the parent partition and not the VMs.

Todd

Array Level MD3000i Performance Monitoring

ToddMuirhead — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:37:00 GMT

During the weekly DellTechCenter Tech Tuesday chat a couple of weeks ago a question came up about performance monitoring with the PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI array. The initial question was how to do performance monitoring from Linux and we addressed it in a followup discussion thread. The answer at this point was to use iostat for Linux or perfmon in windows to monitor performance on each host that was attached to the MD3000i array. This lead to a follow on question which was how to monitor the performance for the entire array.

The management tool for the MD3000i, PowerVault Modular Disk Storage Manager, does not include any performance stats beyond basic iSCSI port level stats. Some investigation into the command line interface for the MD3000i revealed that there is a command to capture the performance stats on the array. Using the smcli, which is installed as part of the MDSM, it is possible to collect the performance stats for the array, controllers, and virtual disks to a csv file.

This turns out to be pretty cool and not too hard to do. Just a simple command and a little bit of spreadsheet magic and you too can produce cool performance graphs of your MD3000i. The details are posted here on delltechcenter.com.

Todd

Virtualization Frontier

Measuring Total CPU Utilization on Hyper-V

Array Level MD3000i Performance Monitoring