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Apr 01, 2015

Are My Hyper-V Servers Really Idle?

Paul Bell

Paul Bell

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It is trickier than it should be to see how utilized a Hyper-V server is when it is running multiple virtual machines (VMs). Don’t bother using Task Manager (Figure 1) on the host as it only shows you resources used by the host partition, not the entire hypervisor.

Figure 1- Task Manager shows this hypervisor running 18 VMs is not doing anything!

Performance Monitor is the tool to review processor utilization including all the virtual machines. Add the counter “Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor(_total)% Total Run Time” (Figure 2) to see total utilization of the hypervisor’s processors.

Figure 2- Now we see the processor is utilized 30-70% of the time

With PowerShell, you can run:

Get-Counter “Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor(_total)% Total Run Time” – SampleInterval 5 –MaxSamples 720 | Export-Counter –Path $homeDocumentsHyperV.blg

This command will output a PerfMon file and show you utilization for an hour for all your VMs.

To contact a Hyper-V Guru, email info@credera.com or call 972.692.0010. For more information on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, please visit our blog or follow us at @CrederaMSFT and @CrederaIT.

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