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Using Perfmon in a Windows VM

by Roger Lund

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com has a very interesting article, titled : Using Perfmon in a Windows VM


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I got a question from a customer as well as a partner recently about whether or not they should use Perfmon in a Windows VM. I emailed our internal performance team to make sure that my answer of “no – it could give you bad results” was an ok answer. Turns out they’re in the process of writing a KB article on the subject and with their permissions I’ve pasted the draft of that KB article below. NOTE: This applies to ESX 3.5 and prior. Talk to your local VMware SE to get some insight into how things are changing. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about future offerings that haven’t been publicly talked about (press, VMworld, etc) in a blog posting.

To ensure the performance numbers are accurate for a virtual machine, perform functional testing on the virtual machine. The internal workings of the virtual machine should not be known by the tester or the performance tools. Follow these guidelines:

  • Use performance tools that are located outside of the virtual machine you are monitoring.
  • If possible, run the performance tools on a host where the virtual machine is not running.
  • For load tests, generate the load outside of the virtual machine being measured.
  • Do not use benchmarking tools. Instead, measure real applications.


Please refer to the Full Link to read the KB Article, I have quoted just a part.

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/12/using-perfmon-in-a-windows-vm.html

Thanks to Mike.

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