As we have discussed on the Monitis blog virtualization is one of the hottest IT subjects today.

One leader in this field is Citrix — with the XenServer product family. XenServer is the most known commercial implementation of of the open source Xen hypervisor. By the way, you should pronounced Xen like “zen.” It comes from a Greek word meaning “guest.”

In our last article we focused on tuning processor and memory, and in this article we’ll look at tuning the performance of Hyper-V and in particular at aspects that of the storage system used by your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V solution.

Supported Technology

Hyper-V supports so-called synthetic and emulated storage devices in virtual machines, where the synthetic devices generally offer better throughput and response times as well as reduced CPU overhead. The exception to this statement is if a filter driver can be loaded and reroutes I/Os to the synthetic storage device. Virtual hard disks (VHDs) can be backed by three types of VHD files or raw disks. This article describes the different options and considerations for tuning storage I/O performance.

This is our second article in our series about tuning performance of your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environment. In our first article we discussed the considerations you should make when selecting the hardware components for your Hyper-V server(s).

We mentioned in our first article that the way the hypervisor virtualizes the physical processors is by time-slicing between the virtual processors. Obviously, moving a workload into a virtual machine increases CPU usage. In this article we’ll discuss how to optimize the processor(s).

Often times when implementing a monitoring solution where, and how to get started can be overwhelming.  It can be especially overwhelming with powerful tools, because you can truly monitor anything.   This series of articles will take a look at some strategies to implement monitoring into your company in a stepped approach, as well as how Monitis can make your life easier.

Overview:  Start Small and Go Big!

Getting started with some monitoring tools can be pretty risky and require an investment that you may not feel comfortable making.  You may find out too late that it does not meet all of your needs.  With Monitis and a stepped approach, there is little to no risk in getting started.  Monitis is “Month to Month” and you pay only for what you use.  Getting started takes only a few minutes, but where should you start?

It is no secret that there is a shift in how technology is being delivered.  Cloud, Hosted, and Virtual are all buzz words that are flooding our conversations, emails, and businesses.  While it is easy to ignore them, there is a concern in the monitoring world. Here a few questions that might have entered your mind:

• Are we losing control?
• Are all SaaS providers created equal?
• What will my role be, now that our critical applications are moved to a hosted solution?

Virtualization in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources. The virtualization of servers, networks and databases is all the rage these days, and we at Monitis feel that a good Q&A is in order to answer any questions that you might have. Here’s a list of some of the top questions most IT administrators have about virtualization — and of course, to go along with them, we’ve provided answers based on our extensive knowledge.

We’ve been working hard on new features between May and June 2011, so please take a look at what’s new at Monitis during that period.

LOCATION PERMISSIONS
To make things easier we changed our location permission approach. Before you had to explicitly specify our external locations to use and were bound to those locations. Now you specify only the maximal number of locations and are free to use and combine our external locations however you want.

VIRTUALIZATION VS VIRTUAL MACHINES

Virtualization is the process or system that separates the physical hardware from its operating system to provide greater utilization of IT resources and a more flexible system.

Virtual machines are a software representation of a physical computer with its own set of virtual hardware within which an operating system and applications are loaded.

VIRTUALIZATION CHALLENGES

Developing a virtualized system can have its benefits, but the hidden cost associated with such a system is seldom considered.

• A company seeking to implement a virtualized system must be prepared to consider altering the current status quo, managing all performance activities, and take into account the scalability limitations.

Before reading this article, I highly suggest to get familiar with all the concepts of the previous article regarding IO tuning.

Your IO please, sir

How is your IO characterized? Yes, this question has to be asked yet again. It’s a big difference when tuning for random access reads vs. sequential reads.
How is your application doing in that matter? – You should know better than me.
My main approach when optimizing for read IO is to access the disks as little as possible. Disks are slow, really slow, comparing to CPU and RAM – if we can – we avoid them.

Many servers, especially databases like MySQL, are dealing with hard drive IO on every data insert, so in order to get much performance out of such databases with extensive amount of data inserts, it is critical to tune the IO writes.

Tuning IO is a tedious task which requires many iterations until you eventually reach your goals or see any results.

While tuning IO, I think that tuning for read performance is a different task from tuning for write performance. Combing them both can sometimes be one of the hardest tasks a SysAdmin can face.

I decided to focus on write performance in the first article.