Checking the performance of your Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Server with Performance Monitor and PAL

Windows Server 2012 brings some great improvements to Virtualization.  We’re currently running it in production and it works wonders, especially with the new Hyper-V Replica feature which is great and free way of implementing DR.  So now you’ve got that cluster running, how can we tell if it is performing well.   I recently stumbled upon PAL or Performance Analysis of Logs Tool, which is freely available from http://pal.codeplex.com/.  The tool comes with a Performance Monitor Template file that we can use to easily record the performance of a Hyper-V 2012 Server and get some visibility into our Servers.

pal_wizard

When it comes to Performance things we would want to look at would be Disk Performance, Memory and CPU but understanding what effect these have on Hyper-V isn’t always straightforward, thankfully PAL helps us being making it easy and straightforward.  So first off go and download it from codplex and install it onto your workstation on desktop PC (not on your Hyper-V Host).  Once installed, open it up.  We need to get our Perfmon template so go into the Threshold File tab and select “Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V” from the Threshold file title, then choose Export to Perfmon template file. Get this onto your Hyper-V Host and open up Performance Monitor on the host we want to watch.

Open up Performance Monitor on our Hyper-V Host and open up Data Collector Sets, right click on User Defined and select New Data Collector Set.  We can call it Hyper-V Performance Counter Set or what every you wish, keep Create from a template (Recommended) selected.  Click next and then browse, selecting the  XML Template file that we exporter earlier from PAL.  Once you finish the wizard it will show up under the User Defined Data Collector Sets. You can now open up the properties and set it to run from 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on what you’re after.  It is best to run this during peak load times (so business hours).

avg_responseNow that you’ve collected the data you want to browse to it and copy the .blg file to your workstation (or where ever you installed PAL). Back to PAL, select the log file under the Counter Log tab, then move onto the Questions Tab where you need to specify things such as processors, total RAM, drive configuration to help specify thresholds for your performance report. Navigate to the other tabs if you wish to modify anything else and finally execute the report, this can be time consuming depending on how long you’ve captured performance data for (it took me around 20 minutes for a 1 hour capture). Once it has completed generating the report it opens up in your web browser.  Key things to look at are disk latency (as per the graph with RED being critical), memory and CPU issues.

That is a free and easy way to check on the health and performance of your new Hyper-V 2012 Cluster.  You can also use PAL for a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster and other services such as Exchange or SQL Server, you just need to select the right template.

How do you stop Server Manager from loading up at start-up on Windows Server 2012

For quite a few of our servers, we would rather not have the server manager boot up every time we login. The quick and easy way to stop it from appearing when you log in is to go into Server Manager, click on the Manage menu item, then go to Server Manager Properties. Once there, simply tick on Do not start Server Manager automatically at logon. That will prevent it from starting up every time.

 

Changing the recovery mode doesn’t shrink an SQL Database log file, how to shrink logs manually.

So I found out recently that one of our servers was running out of space.  It’s our AV server so I was like what the hell, why is it running out.  Turns out it had an instance of SQL Server on there as a quarantine and configuration database.  The Virtual Machine was being backed up but not the database itself therefore no log back ups and log truncates after that.

To check exactly how much space the logs are taking up you can run the following SQL cmd:

SELECT * FROM <database>.sys.sysfiles

Or you could just as easily right-click the database and check file sizes from there.

To fix this I simply changed the recovery mode from FULL to Simple for the databases, but without a backup of the databases themselves the logs wouldn’t truncate.  Doing a backup from the right-click menu won’t truncate them either.  Since I wasn’t really worried about backing up the database itself I could just force SQL Server to truncate the logs.  I ran the following command to shrink the log file:

DBCC SHRINKFILE('<database_log>')

With <database_log> being the name of the database log file you want to shrink.  That solves that problem.