Windows Memory - OS Test

To understand the metrics reported by this test, it is essential to understand how memory is handled by the operating system. On any Windows system, memory is partitioned into a part that is available for user processes, and another that is available to the OS kernel. The kernel memory area is divided into several parts, with the two major parts (called "pools") being a nonpaged pool and a paged pool. The nonpaged pool is a section of memory that cannot, under any circumstances, be paged to disk. The paged pool is a section of memory that can be paged to disk. (Just being stored in the paged pool doesn't necessarily mean that something has been paged to disk. It just means that it has either been paged to disk or it could be paged to disk.) Sandwiched directly in between the nonpaged and paged pools (although technically part of the nonpaged pool) is a section of memory called the "System Page Table Entries," or "System PTEs." The WindowsMemory - Guest test tracks critical metrics corresponding to the System PTEs and the pool areas of kernel memory of a Windows virtual machine.

This test is disabled by default. To enable the test, go to the enable / disable tests page using the menu sequence : Agents -> Tests -> Enable/Disable, pick Citrix Hypervisor as the desired Component type, set Performance as the Test type, choose the test from the disabled tests list, and click on the < button to move the test to the ENABLED TESTS list. Finally, click the Update button.

Target of the test : A Citrix Hypervisor host

Agent deploying the test : An internal/remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every Windows VM guest/user on the monitored target hypervisor.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter	Description
Test period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The host for which the test is to be configured.
Port	The port at which the specified host listens. By default, this is NULL.
Xen User, Xen Password and Confirm Password	To enable the eG agent to connect to the XenServer API for collecting statistics of interest, this test should login to the target hypervisor as a root user. Provide the name of the root user in the Xen User text box. Root user privileges are mandatory when monitoring a XenServer 5.5 (or below). However, if you are monitoring XenServer 5.6 (or above) and you prefer not to expose the credentials of the root user, then, you have the option of configuring a user with pool-admin privileges as the Xen User. If you do not want to expose the credentials of a root/pool-admin user, then you can configure the tests with the credentials of a Xen User with Read-only privileges to the XenServer. However, if this is done, then the Xen Uptime test will not run, and the Xen CPU and Xen Memory tests will not be able to report metrics for the control domain descriptor. To avoid such an outcome, do the following before attempting to configure the eG tests with a Xen User who has Read-only privileges to the Citrix Hypervisor: Modify the target hypervisor's configuration in the eG Enterprise. For this, follow the Infrastructure -> Components -> Add/Modify menu sequence, pick Citrix Hypervisor as the Component type, and click the Modify button corresponding to the target hypervisor. In the MODIFY COMPONENT DETAILS page that then appears, make sure that the os is set to Xen and the Mode is set to SSH. Then, in the same page, proceed to provide the User and Password of a user who has the right to connect to the XenServer console via SSH. Then, click the Update button to save the changes. Once this is done, you can configure the eG tests with the credentials of a Xen User with Read-only privileges. The password of the specified Xen User needs to be mentioned in the Xen Password text box. Then, confirm the Xen Password by retyping it in the Confirm Password text box.
SSL	By default, the Citrix Hypervisor is not SSL-enabled. This indicates that by default, the eG agent communicates with the target hypervisor using HTTP. Accordingly, the SSL flag is set to No by default. If you configure the target hypervisor to use SSL, then make sure that the SSL flag is set to Yes, so that the eG agent communicates with the target hypervisor using HTTPS. Note that a default SSL certificate comes bundled with every Citrix Hypervisor installation. If you want the eG agent to use this default certificate for communicating with an SSL-enabled Citrix Hypervisor, then no additional configuration is required. However, if you do not want to use the default certificate, then you can generate a self-signed certificate for use by the target hypervisor. In such a case, you need to explicitly follow the broad steps given below to enable the eG agent to communicate with the target hypervisor via HTTPS: Obtain the server-certificate for the Citrix Hypervisor Import the server-certificate into the local certificate store of the eG agent For a detailed discussion on each of these steps, refer to the Troubleshooting section of this document.
Inside View Using	By default, this test obtains the “inside view” of VMs using the eG VM Agent. Accordingly, the Inside view using flag is set to eG VM Agent by default. The eG VM Agent is a piece of software, which should be installed on every VM on a hypervisor. Every time the eG agent runs this test, it uses the eG VM Agent to pull relevant 'inside view' metrics from each VM. Once the metrics are collected, the eG agent then communicates with each VM agent and pulls these metrics, without requiring administrator privileges. Refer to Configuring the Remote Agent to Obtain the Inside View of VMs for more details on the eG VM Agent.
Domain, Admin User, and Admin Password, and Confirm Password	By default, these parameters are set to none. This is because, by default, the eG agent collects 'inside view' metrics using the eG VM agent on each VM. Domain administrator privileges need not be granted to the eG agent if it uses this default approach to obtain the 'inside view' of Windows VMs.
Ignore VMs Inside View	Administrators of some high security environments might not have permissions to internally monitor one/more VMs. The eG agent can be configured to not obtain the 'inside view' of such ‘inaccessible’ VMs using the Ignore VMs Inside View parameter. Against this parameter, you can provide a comma-separated list of VM names, or VM name patterns, for which the inside view need not be obtained. For instance, your IGNORE VMS INSIDE VIEW specification can be: xp,lin,win,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside view of all VMs on a Citrix Hypervisor host by default. Note: While performing VM discovery, the eG agent will not discover the operating system of the VMs configured in the Ignore VMs Inside View text box.
Exclude VMs	Administrators of some virtualized environments may not want to monitor some of their less-critical VMs - for instance, VM templates - both from 'outside' and from 'inside'. The eG agent in this case can be configured to completely exclude such VMs from its monitoring purview. To achieve this, provide a comma-separated list of VMs to be excluded from monitoring in the Exclude VMs text box. Instead of VMs, VM name patterns can also be provided here in a comma-separated list. For example, your Exclude VMs specification can be: xp,lin,win,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside and outside views of all VMs on a virtual host by default. By providing a comma-separated list of VMs/VM name patterns in the Exclude VMs text box, you can make sure the eG agent stops collecting 'inside' and 'outside' view metrics for a configured set of VMs.
Ignore Winnt	By default, the eG agent does not support the inside view for VMs executing on Windows NT operating systems. Accordingly, the Ignore Winnt flag is set to Yes by default.
Webport	By default, in most virtualized environments, the target hypervisor listens on port 80 (if not SSL-enabled) or on port 443 (if SSL-enabled). This implies that while monitoring an SSL-enabled Citrix hypervisor, the eG agent, by default, connects to port 443 of the server to pull out metrics, and while monitoring a non-SSL-enabled Citrix hypervisor, the eG agent connects to port 80. Accordingly, the webport parameter is set to 80 or 443 depending upon the status of the ssl flag. In some environments however, the default ports 80 or 443 might not apply. In such a case, against the webport parameter, you can specify the exact port at which the target hypervisor in your environment listens so that the eG agent communicates with that port.
Report by User	While monitoring a Citrix Hypervisor, the Report by User flag is set to No by default, indicating that by default, the guest operating systems on the target hypervisor are identified using the host name specified in the operating system. On the other hand, while monitoring a Citrix hypervisor-VDI, this flag is set to Yes by default; this implies that in case of the Citrix hypervisor-VDI model, by default, the desktops will be identified using the login of the user who is accessing them. In other words, in VDI environments, this test will, by default, report measures for every username_on_virtualmachinename.
Report Powered OS	This flag becomes relevant only if the Report by User flag is set to ‘Yes’. If the report powered os flag is set to Yes (which is the default setting), then this test will report measures for even those VMs that do not have any users logged in currently. Such guests will be identified by their virtualmachine name and not by the username_on_virtualmachinename. On the other hand, if the report powered os flag is set to No, then this test will not report measures for those VMs to which no users are logged in currently.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Free entries in system page table	Indicates the number of page table entries not currently in use by the guest.	Number	The maximum number of System PTEs that a server can have is set when the server boots. In heavily-used servers, you can run out of system PTEs. You can use the registry to increase the number of system PTEs, but that encroaches into the paged pool area, and you could run out of paged pool memory. Running out of either one is bad, and the goal should be to tune your server so that you run out of both at the exact same time. Typically, the value of this metric should be above 3000.
Page read rate in VM	Indicates the average number of times per second the disk was read to resolve hard fault paging.	Reads/Sec
Page write rate in VM	Indicates the average number of times per second the pages are written to disk to free up the physical memory.	Writes/Sec
Page input rate in VM	Indicates the number of times per second that a process needed to access a piece of memory that was not in its working set, meaning that the guest had to retrieve it from the page file.	Pages/Sec
Page output rate in VM	Indicates the number of times per second the guest decided to trim a process's working set by writing some memory to disk in order to free up physical memory for another process.	Pages/Sec	This value is a critical measure of the memory utilization on a guest. If this value never increases, then there is sufficient memory in the guest. Instantaneous spikes of this value are acceptable, but if the value itself starts to rise over time or with load, it implies that there is a memory shortage on the guest.
Memory pool non-paged data in VM	Indicates the total size of the kernel memory nonpaged pool.	MB	The kernel memory nonpage pool is an area of guest memory (that is, memory used by the guest operating system) for kernel objects that cannot be written to disk, but must remain in memory as long as the objects are allocated. Typically, there should be no more than 100 MB of non-paged pool memory being used.
Memory pool paged data in VM	Indicates the total size of the Paged Pool.	MB	If the Paged Pool starts to run out of space (when it's 80% full by default), the guest will automatically take some memory away from the System File Cache and give it to the Paged Pool. This makes the System File Cache smaller. However, the system file cache is critical, and so it will never reach zero. Hence, a significant increase in the paged pool size is a problem. This metric is a useful indicator of memory leaks in a guest. A memory leak occurs when the guest allocates more memory to a process than the process gives back to the pool. Any time of process can cause a memory leak. If the amount of paged pool data keeps increasing even though the workload on the guest remains constant, it is an indicator of a memory leak.
Committed memory in use in VM	Indicates the committed bytes as a percentage of the Commit Limit.	Percent	Whenever this measure exceeds 80-90%, application requests to allocate memory in the virtual memory (page file). This ratio can be reduced by increasing the Physical memory or the Page file.
Pool nonpaged failures in VM	Indicates the number of times allocations have failed from non paged pool.	Number	Generally, a non-zero value indicates a shortage of physical memory.
Pool paged failures in VM	Indicates the number of times allocations have failed from paged pool.	Number	A non-zero value indicates a shortage of physical memory.
Copy read hits in VM	Indicates what percent of read I/O being served is coming from system cache, not disk.	Percentage	This is an important counter for applications like the Citrix Provisioning server that stream large volumes of data. If the RAM cache of the server is not sufficiently large, a lot of the I/O requests will be served from the disk, and not the system cache. This will reduce performance. Hence, it is critical to monitor this metric. The higher the value, the better the performance you can see from the server.
Copy reads in VM	Indicates how many hits you are really getting.	Reads/Sec	A copy read is a file read operation that is satisfied by a memory copy from a page in the cache to the application's buffer. The LAN redirector uses this method for retrieving information from the cache, as does the LAN server for small transfers. This method is also used by the disk file systems.
Page fault rate in VM	Indicates the rate at which the page faults occurred.	Faults/Sec	Page Faults occur in the threads executing in a process. A page fault occurs when a thread refers to a virtual memory page that is not in its working set in main memory. If the page is on the standby list and hence already in main memory, or if the page is in use by another process with whom the page is shared, then the page fault will not cause the page to be fetched from disk. Excessive page faults could result in decreased performance.