Which of the following information does a hyper-v resource metering record choose all that apply

12. Which of the following is true if you enable shielding and create a shielded VM in WindowsServer 2016? (Choose all that apply.)

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Key benefits
Use of network metering port ACLs
Virtual machine metrics
Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V

Article
10/25/2016
2 minutes to read

Applies To: Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012

IT organizations need tools to charge back business units that they support while providing the business units with the right amount of resources to match their needs. For hosting providers, it is equally important to issue chargebacks based on the amount of usage by each customer.

To implement advanced billing strategies that measure both the assigned capacity of a resource and its actual usage, earlier versions of Hyper-V required users to develop their own chargeback solutions that polled and aggregated performance counters. These solutions could be expensive to develop and sometimes led to loss of historical data.

To assist with more accurate, streamlined chargebacks while protecting historical information, Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 introduces Resource Metering, a feature that allows customers to create cost-effective, usage-based billing solutions. With this feature, service providers can choose the best billing strategy for their business model, and independent software vendors can develop more reliable, end-to-end chargeback solutions on top of Hyper-V.

Key benefits

Hyper-V Resource Metering in Windows Server 2012 allows organizations to avoid the expense and complexity associated with building in-house metering solutions to track usage within specific business units. It enables hosting providers to quickly and cost-efficiently create a more advanced, reliable, usage-based billing solution that adjusts to the provider's business model and strategy.

Use of network metering port ACLs

Enterprises pay for the Internet traffic in and out of their data centers, but not for the network traffic within their data centers. For this reason, providers generally consider Internet and intranet traffic separately for the purposes of billing. To differentiate between Internet and intranet traffic, providers can measure incoming and outgoing network traffic for any IP address range, by using network metering port ACLs.

Virtual machine metrics

Windows Server 2012 provides two options for administrators to obtain historical data on a client's use of virtual machine resources: Hyper-V cmdlets in Windows PowerShell and the new APIs in the Virtualization WMI provider. These tools expose the metrics for the following resources used by a virtual machine during a specific period of time:

Average CPU usage, measured in megahertz over a period of time.
Average physical memory usage, measured in megabytes.
Minimum memory usage (lowest amount of physical memory).
Maximum memory usage (highest amount of physical memory).
Maximum amount of disk space allocated to a virtual machine.
Total incoming network traffic, measured in megabytes, for a virtual network adapter.
Total outgoing network traffic, measured in megabytes, for a virtual network adapter.

Movement of virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts—for example, through live, offline, or storage migrations—does not affect the collected data.

“Resource Metering” is a brand new feature in Hyper-V 3.0, included with Windows Server 2012. It allows Hyper-V administrators to track CPU usage, RAM and the network utilization of VMs working on a host. Since more companies are providing users with an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) plans, Hyper-V’s resource metering may be helpful for analyzing VM impact on a system and for calculating chargebacks to VM’s end-users accordingly.

Today, I’m going to talk about practical examples of resource metering and how it can provide you with better visibility into Hyper-V resources.

Note 1: Keep in mind that enabled resource metering might make some insignificant impact on disk and CPU performance as the data is saved to the configuration file.

Note 2: Don’t mix it up with a “metered connection” in Windows 8/8.1.

Unlike the majority of Hyper-V features, there is no GUI to play with. This feature will primarily use PowerShell cmdlets instead. Not a problem, right? Open a PowerShell console in elevated mode and use the Enable-VMResourceMetering Windows PowerShell cmdlet to get started (as resource metering is not enabled by default):

Get-VM -Name vmname | Enable-VMResourceMetering

where vmname is a name of a desired VM.

Figure 1. Enabling resource metering

There will be no indication that it’s enabled, which I, personally, find rather confusing. So double check everything is alright. Next command lists all VMs with enabled resource metering:

Get-VM | Format-Table Name, State, ResourceMeteringEnabled

Figure 2. Checking whether resource metering is enabled for VMs

As you can see, win10 VM is shown as one with enabled metering.

In general, resource metering allows you to record the following information:

Average CPU usage
Measured in MHz. This unit was selected by developers in order to calculate the CPU usage properly even during VM migration across hosts with different CPU capacity. Metering information in such cases migrates with the VM as well and you’re getting an average value.The formula is as follows: The CPU frequency of the Hyper-V host multiplies to an average CPU consumption by this VM (decimal) and to a number of hours host.Example: A VM, which worked on a host with 3 GHz CPU and took 30% of CPU utilization within an hour will get: 3000 MHz*0.3*1 = 1000 MHz
Average memory usage, Minimum memory usage, Maximum memory usageMemory usage is reported in MB. Minimum memory usage is reported (in MB) according to the time when the VM was working, not shut down.
Maximum disk allocation
Maximum disk allocation is reported in MB, including the size of the virtual disks and checkpoints (snapshots) together. Note: If you use thin (dynamically expanding) disks, they will be reported as its full possible size, regardless of the actual amount of data on them.
Inbound network traffic, Outbound network traffic
Network traffic is also measured in MB. Only network traffic that costs money (internet) is taken into account. Intranet traffic is not calculated since it doesn’t cost a dime to a service provider. Traffic calculation is performed with an assistance of 2 access control list (ACL) sets, which are created once you enable resource metering, and distinguished outbound from inbound, IPv4 from IPv6 and internet from intranet traffic.

Let’s run the Measure-VM cmdlet now and check the measured values in my lab. Following command lists all VMs on this host and displays resource metering, when enabled:

Get-VM | Measure-VM

Figure 3. List all VMs on a host and show resource metering, when enabled

Win10 VM has recently got new updates, consumed some traffic and I can clearly see that from the listed output. To show only this VM data execute:

Get-VM -Name win10 | Measure-VM

Figure 4. Show resource metering for a specified VM

To check only preconfigured VM metrics:

Get-VM -ComputerName localhost -Name “win10” | Measure-VM | Select-Object VMname, AvgCPU, AvgRAM

Figure 5. Show selected metrics for a specified VM

To get an extended list of VM metrics:

Get-VM -ComputerName localhost -Name “win10” | Measure-VM | Select-Object *

Figure 6. Show extended list of VM metrics

There is a default interval of an hour when the Hyper-V host saves the metering information. You can’t decrease this interval, but can increase it by using the following cmdlet

Set-VMHost -ResourceMeteringSaveInterval hh:mm:ss

where “hh:mm:ss” is the desired time frame

In the following example, I tried to set up 30-minute, 1-hour 1-minute 1-second and 2-hour intervals. See what happened:

Figure 7. Changing resource metering save interval

Once you enable resource metering, the Hyper-V host is gathering data unless you reset it. That can be done by running:

Get-VM -Name vmname | Reset-VMResourceMetering

After that, all the previously collected data is purged.

As soon as you played enough with resource metering, don’t forget to disable it:

Get-VM | Disable-VMResourceMetering

Although you can extract data using the Measure-VM cmdlet, you need to use another solution to output this data into a visual form like a graph or use any 3rd party tool like Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V.

Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V

If you feel, what was described above wasn’t that easy for you or you’re not a scripting person and like to see things more clear, here’s another tool worth checking out: Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V. It gathers a bit less information to present to the administrator, but it has a small size (1Mb) and doesn’t require installation (portable), so it can work right from an attached USB drive.

This program displays real-time CPU and RAM utilization of all VMs working on a Hyper-V host and can gather information from a remote host as well. With this, it is much easier for you to manage VM consumption dynamics and oversee the trend.

Figure 8. Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V

To conclude, resource metering in Hyper-V and Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V both allow you to bring some value to your business, calculate charges for resource utilization and manage virtual resources in a better way. No VM activity will come through them undiscovered.

Got advanced scripts for resource metering? Share with the community in the comments, so we all can benefit.