Monitoring VMs on Hyper-V

Previously, we elaborately discussed about the wide variety of external metrics that provides an “external” view of the different VM guests - and these metrics are based on what the Hyper-V host is viewing about the performance of the individual guests. However, in some environments, administrators may not be inclined to identify the external metrics, and they may still want to monitor the internal health indicators. For instance, suppose one of the disk partitions of the guest operating system has reached capacity. This information cannot be gleaned from host operating system. Likewise, bottlenecks such as a longer process run queue or a higher disk queue length are more visible using an internal monitor. Internal monitoring (from within the guest operating system) also provides details about the resource utilization of different application(s) or processes.

In order to enable administrators to collect such internal metrics in a non-intrusive manner, eG Enterprise offers the VMs on Hyper-V model. This model provides an “internal” view of the workings of each of the guests. For this, a light-weight eG VM Agent is used, which if deployed on each VM, periodically measures how that VM utilizes the resources that are allocated to it, and how well that VM handles user sessions, TCP traffic, and network loading. To use this model, only a single eG external agent is required; this agent sits on a remote host and periodically polls the eG VM Agent on each VM to determine the required metrics.

Figure 1 : Layer model of the VMs on Hyper-V

The tests associated with the Inside View of Desktops Layer of this model has already been explained in the previous sections.