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We have 2 Hyper-V hosts with quite a lot of resources (192 GB RAM, 12 core CPU's, 15K RPM hard disks).

However we do ask a lot from these machines as they are both running a file server, an exchange server, 2 domain controllers, a bunch of IIS servers and a terminal server farm For a total of approx. 14 Virtual Machines per Hyper-V host. None of these machines use less than 8GB RAM. The 3 terminal servers use 24GB ram and the exchange servers use 32GB RAM.

It's great that we can create as many virtual servers as we want but it's easy to forget that for every Virtual Machine we create and run we are still depleting the same physical hardware resources.

My question: How do we effectively conclude whether we are overloading our Hyper-V hosts with Virtual Machines and we should prepare a third hardware-based Hyper-V host?

Advice would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

Kevv
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    Do you have any sort of monitoring in place? Based on my rough calculations you're at about 184/192 GB RAM usage and vastly over-committed on CPU. – Nathan C Nov 01 '17 at 14:48
  • Thanks for your fast reply, Nathan C. You're spot on when it comes to RAM and probably right about CPU, too. I have tried some experimentation with Process Monitor but to be honest the graphs don't tell me a lot. Do you have any recommendations? – Kevv Nov 01 '17 at 14:57
  • Maybe some tool like [this](https://www.manageengine.com/free-hyperv-performance-monitor/free-hyperv-performance-monitor-index.html)? It's probably safe to say that you're likely experiencing CPU contention at the very least. – Nathan C Nov 01 '17 at 15:07
  • Hi Nathan, I Googled some and started running a CPU total % usage on the Hyper-V machines. One of them is definitely at a "stable" 90-95% CPU usage, the other is at 60-70% usage. So the quick-fix will be to transfer one or two Virtual Machines to the "less crowded" Virtual Host. But I'm definitely gonna run the tool you linked and consider getting a third Hyper-V machine. Thanks a lot for your help! – Kevv Nov 01 '17 at 15:21
  • Hi Nathan, I'd like to mark you as the solving anwser for this issue but since we've discussed this in the comments I'm not able to! – Kevv Nov 14 '17 at 08:55

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Based on our conversation it looks like you're experiencing CPU contention. Running a tool like this helped confirm.

Nathan C
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  • Thank you Nathan! We've concluded it is indeed the CPU that is the bottleneck and have already ordered additional processors. – Kevv Nov 15 '17 at 07:34