Virtualization is the technique of creating a software-based virtual version of something, whether that be computers, storage, networking, servers, or applications. Virtualization creates a virtual layer over the hardware, enabling the creation of virtual machines (VMs), which are virtual computers that you can run multiple of on a single piece of hardware. Many VMs can be created on a single host server, allowing businesses to use the system hardware more efficiently and get a better ROI for the hardware cost. There are several advantages of virtualization, including:
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Agility: Virtualization allows network admins to scale their infrastructure up or down to meet their needs.
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Manageability: With virtualization, you’ll be able to move, copy, and isolate virtual computers, giving you better manageability.
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Sustainability: You will gain improved energy savings by using less computer hardware and thus less electricity.
Virtualization improves the availability and security of your infrastructure. However, an end user’s two most critical demands regarding their virtual infrastructure are reliability and stable performance. You’ll need performance metrics in place to achieve these. Observing performance patterns over time also helps you plan for the future of your virtual infrastructure. Those metrics must be monitored regularly against a baseline so that resources may be modified as needed.
Microsoft Hyper-V performance monitoring
Microsoft Hyper-V is virtualization software that enables you to create and run a virtual server that functions as if it were a separate server. It allows admins to create multiple virtual servers within the main physical server. Hyper-V enables organizations to easily configure the host and VMs to reside in logical groups that dictate various aspects of the virtual infrastructure, like physical object location, resource allocation and limitations for VMs, and high availability settings for the host and virtual components. Because of this exceptional versatility, Hyper-V remains one of the most popular virtual server providers.
However, Hyper-V management tools are essential for real-time monitoring of Hyper-V performance and ensuring the maximum efficiency of the virtual devices. The three most important components of a virtual environment are the processor, disk, and memory. As a result, it’s only natural that Hyper-V performance monitoring, particularly in virtual settings, is focused on these three resources.
Processor performance metrics
Hyper-V and Hyper-V guests have their own processor performance metrics. One is for assessing the overall performance of the Hyper-V system. This is the percentage total runtime metric for the Hyper-V hypervisor logical processor, which shows how much time the processor spends operating the host and guest VMs. You don’t want to see this number rise past 60% on a regular basis. Anything above 75% indicates that the host processors are over utilized.
If the host is at a reasonable level and a guest VM is still having performance issues, there are processor metrics for the guests as well. The percentage total runtime metric for the Hyper-V hypervisor virtual processor is one of the most significant statistics to look at in this instance. This metric shows which virtual processor takes the longest to process. If this metric is frequently high (above 75%), you should disable any unnecessary roles and services on the guest VM that is causing problems. You should also think about adding a second virtual CPU to the VM in question.
Disk performance metrics
Two metrics are good indicators of disk performance on both the host Hyper-V machine and the guest VMs: logical disk average disk seconds/read and logical disk average disk seconds/write. These metrics monitor how quickly the operating system responds to read and write operations. As a general rule, these values should be between 15 and 20 milliseconds. Anything longer than 25 milliseconds may have a negative influence on the performance of the host and VMs.
Memory performance metrics
When it comes to memory, two important questions should be answered: How much memory is available, and what percentage of the swap file is used? The available megabytes of memory metric is used to determine how much memory is available to the Hyper-V host. You should have between 10% and 20% of your total memory free. To put it another way, you shouldn’t use more than 90% of your available RAM on your Hyper-V host.
Memory pages/second is another metric that you should keep an eye on. It measures the pace at which pages are read from or written to the disk. If this value is excessively high, it might indicate faulty memory blocks or a lack of available memory. For a healthy system, this value should be 500 or less. You should keep an eye on this number if the value is between 500 and 1,000. Performance will be negatively impacted if the value is more than 1,000.
ManageEngine OpManager: Comprehensive virtualization management for Hyper-V
ManageEngine OpManager is a powerful Hyper-V performance monitoring software that gives you total visibility into the performance of your hosts and VMs.
- With exclusive device templates, you can automatically discover and identify Hyper-V devices.
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OpManager’s actionable intelligence makes recommendations for optimizing your Hyper-V infrastructure and provides predictive performance suggestions.
- Using real-time dashboards, identify and fix performance, capacity, and configuration issues. With a full analysis on over- and under-provisioned VMs, plan your virtual infrastructure capacity.
- OpManager detects VM sprawl and helps with disk space recovery and optimization. There’s also a VM sprawl dashboard that shows you where resources in your virtual infrastructure can be transferred to improve the Hyper-V infrastructure’s performance.
- OpManager provides real-time monitoring of critical Hyper-V performance metrics for the processor, disc, and memory, aiding in the optimization of the Hyper-V infrastructure’s performance.
- OpManager uses baseline thresholds to notify you when clusters, hosts, or VMs are experiencing performance issues. Get quick email or SMS notifications regarding outage and performance issues.
Claim your free, 30-day trial of the full version of OpManager to evaluate the benefits of using a Hyper-V performance monitoring software in your organization. You can also schedule a free demo with a product expert. If you need assistance or have questions, email us at eval-itom@manageengine.com.
OpManager is a part of ManageEngine’s ITOM suite of solutions. Apart from network monitoring, this suite also offers solutions for streamlining server monitoring, application monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, configuration management, firewall security and compliance, and IP address and switch port management. This is why ManageEngine’s ITOM solutions are the ideal choice for over one million IT admins worldwide.