Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Recommended Performance Monitor Counters
I recommend monitoring the following three general groups of Performance Monitor counters to
track the health of your virtual database server.
On the Host Server
Collecting performance information from the host server your SQL Server instance is running on
will help you understand whether SQL Server itself should be performing as you expect it to be.
For example, how busy are the host server's physical CPU cores and how much of the HBA's capacity
is currently being used? It may also be necessary to collect performance data from the host server
about a virtual server's resource utilization. This depends on your hypervisor but with Hyper-V, for
example, a virtual server's true CPU utilization data is exposed at Virtual Processor counters on
the host server. Interestingly, VMware does the opposite, exposing performance data about the host
server to Performance Monitor in the virtual server.
Monitor the following performance counters on the host server:
➤
Percentage of physical CPU utilization
➤
Percentage of physical memory utilization
➤
Any CPU latency experienced by the hypervisor (VMware calls this CPU Ready Time)
➤
Total amount of memory currently allocated to the host's virtual servers
➤
Physical storage MB/s and IOPS that the hypervisor is using
➤
Physical storage read and write latency times
➤
Percentage of HBA bandwidth utilization
➤
Percentage of NIC bandwidth utilization
On the Virtual Server
Performance data gathered from within a virtual server is likely to be more meaningful if it refers to
logical objects or is measuring the proportion of the virtual server's resource currently being used.
For example, the % CPU utilization values that Task Manager and Performance Monitor display
inside a virtual server indicate how much of the processor resource available to the virtual server
is currently being used. Unfortunately, those values cannot be related to a specii c physical and
quantii able hardware sizing metric — i.e., they don't indicate whether 100% is a throttled 1GHz of
CPU resource or the entire native 3GHz of the physical CPU. These metrics still have value,
however. If you look at Task Manager on a virtual server and see that your anti-virus software is
using 60% of your CPU resource, that's an issue whether the server is virtual or physical.
The counters you should monitor here are as follows:
➤
% logical CPU utilization
➤
Total physical memory (MB)
➤
Available memory (MB)
➤
Logical storage MB/s and IOPS that the operating system is using
➤
Logical storage read and write latency times
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