Monitor health and performance of a virtual environment (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

This article describes the monitoring required for a virtual environment. It is necessary to monitor the virtual machines in the farm as well as the virtualization servers to ensure that the health and performance levels meet operational standards and the service level agreements that are in place.

Monitor SharePoint health and performance

The following articles provide information about monitoring Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 health and performance:

• Health monitoring (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Monitor Hyper-V health and performance

You can monitor Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology health and server performance using Microsoft products or by using Windows PowerShell scripts. The following products can be used to monitor a virtual environment.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 provides an end-to-end monitoring and reporting system that you can use to monitor Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and supported versions of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server. For more information, see System Center Operations Manager (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187743).

If you are using System Center Operations Manager we recommend that you obtain and install the following management packs as appropriate for your environment:

• Windows Server Hyper-V Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187744)

• Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=147087)

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=156500)

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R (SCVMM) is a robust tool for managing all aspects of a Hyper-V virtual environment. In addition to virtual provisioning, the Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) enables the dynamic management of virtual resources though Management Packs that are PRO enabled. SCVMM can use the monitoring capabilities of System Center Operations Manager 2007, which enables administrators to establish remedial actions for VMM to execute if poor performance or pending hardware failures are identified in hardware, operating systems, or applications. You can also obtain the current health and state of virtual machines and get a real time view of CPU, memory, and storage consumption on the virtualization servers.

Health and performance resources

Numerous articles and blog posts provide in-depth guidance to monitoring Hyper-V health and performance. We recommend that you consult the following resources:

• Hyper-V performance FAQ R2 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187745)

• Monitoring Hyper-V performance (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187746)

• Hyper-V performance comparison: Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 and R2 with Intel Xeon processor X5570- and E5450-based servers (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187747)

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Performance Paper (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187749)

• Windows Server Performance Team Blog: Increase VMBus buffer sizes to increase network throughput to guest VMs (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187750)

• Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 IDE vs. SCSI Performance (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187751)

• Benchmarking Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187752)

• Henk's tech blog: Archive for the 'SQL 2008 R2' Category (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=187753)