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HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V

Written on Mar 11 2009 4,524 views, 12 comments


by Tim Mangan

If you use Hyper-V, or any OS virtualization platform, you know that you can't trust the Windows Task Manager from inside the VMs to tell you squat.  Basically, the virtualization layer pulls the rug out from under the guest OS when it comes to CPU and the guest is clueless and assumes that whatever was paused just ate CPU the whole time.

I was looking at a performance issue on Hyper-V and needed to investigate.  Searching the web I found Perfmon info but got sick of setting that up, and then having to do paper and pencil math to figure out what I wanted to know.  So I did what I always do -- I wrote a tool!  The tool is called HyperV_Mon and is basically a GUI that does all the hard work for you.  Here is a screen shot:


 A very short PDF White Paper about the tool can be downloaded from this link.  Reading that will help you to understand the image above.

The tool itself is free and can be found from this link. You don't even need to register or anything silly like that. We don't even have salesperson to call you!



Comments

Matt Kosht wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 03-13-2009 9:53 AM

Tim. Nice utility. Having a small issue with 8 cores. This seems to throw off the text alignment (graphs write over text)

sites.google.com/.../koshthyperv

Tim Mangan wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 03-16-2009 9:07 AM

Matt - Yeah, I'm trying to decide what to do about that.  Fortunately that text isn't very important which is why the graphs overwrite.  I will be updating the tool and adjusting those soon.

Tim Mangan wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 03-17-2009 4:46 PM

An updated version (1.2) is now on the site.  8/16 cores should now show OK without overwrites.  Also the graphs now have history, showing the last 60 intervals and an average value.

AYA wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 03-25-2009 6:13 AM

Tim,  

Thank you for such excellent utility!

But when I use it on my hyper-v server (64bit win2008) it generates warnings in error log like this:

---

Windows Management Instrumentation has stopped WMIPRVSE.EXE because a quota reached a warning value. Quota: HandleCount  Value: 4707 Maximum value: 4096 WMIPRVSE PID: 4244

---

Is this bug in our system or some kind of error in your utility?

ps: sorry for poor English.

Tim Mangan wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 03-25-2009 6:33 PM

That's a new one to me.  Are you running SCVMM or any other wmi based monitoring utility talking to the primary partition OS?

AYA wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 03-26-2009 5:09 AM

Tim, no. We don't use SCVMM, this is a simple Win2008 ent x64 server on Intel Quad Q9300, 8Gb RAM and 5 VMs.

All windows updates are installed.

Tim Mangan wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 04-01-2009 12:10 PM

Upon investigation, this appears to be a Microsoft issue on WS2008.  It may be reproduced using Wbemtest against the same HV counters instead of this tool.  I have a bug into Microsoft.

The tool isn't intended to be a long term monitoring tool.  So just shut it down after a while and the wmiprvse worker process will shut down.  You can slow the rate by using the configuration.  I suppose you could increase the quota in WMI, but that is not recommended.

Tim Mangan wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 04-26-2009 11:50 AM

A new version (1.4) was posted to the website yesterday.  This version just improves the display for people that have lots of VMs and want to full screen the display for better visibility.

Tim Mangan wrote re: HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V
on 06-28-2009 4:06 PM

Version 1.6 posted to www.tmurgent.com/Tools.aspx .   Improved histograms on cpu use plus a look at Memory / Paging / Network & File IO added.

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