Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

 Myself and Alan Richards have so far given 3 SharePoint 2010 in Education presentations on using HyperV to host your SharePoint 2010 environment and we have be amending the presentation as we go thanks to questions and comments from the attendees, well the presentation we gave yesterday in Manchester was the first time we have been asked about monitoring our HyperV farms.

 This question was asked by a VMware user who wished to save money year on year and switch to using HyperV, but one of his concerns was the switch would deny him the use of the VMware monitoring tools which apparently are superb. So I thought over the next couple of posts I would cover 2 of the tools available to monitor and administer your HyperV environment. The second post will cover System Centre Virtual Machine Manager but I thought I would start with a free tool.

 So I would like to introduce you to the best free HyperV monitor that I have found, it is written by Tore Lervik MVP and is just a desktop gadget that is one of those rare breeds a piece of software that does exactly what it is designed for just monitoring your HyperV servers no more no less, This gadget just sits on my desktop and lets me know in a visual manner what activity is happening and more importantly for me how much memory I have available on my HyperV host servers.

The tool is currently on version 5.2 and some of the features are

VM CPU Graph

Wake on LAN support

VM RDP (If the host is running 2008 R2)

Multilanguage support

I cannot tell you how useful this gadget is, so why not download it and give it a go you will not regret it the download can be found at http://mindre.net/post/Hyper-V-Monitor-Gadget-for-Windows-Sidebar.aspx

Dave