Resource metering

Resource metering is a new feature of Windows Server 2012 designed to make it easier to
build solutions for tracking how cloud services are consumed. Such tracking is important in both enterprise and hosting scenarios. For example, if a hosting provider provides cloud-based applications and services to customers, the hosting provider needs a way of tracking how much resources those customers are consuming to bill them for their use of these resources. Similarly, if a large enterprise has deployed a shared private cloud that is
accessed by different business units within the organization, the enterprise needs a way of tracking how much cloud resources each business unit is consuming. This information may be needed for internal billing purposes by the organization, or it may be used to help plan how cloud resources are allocated so that each business unit gets its fair share of the resources they need.

Previously, enterprises or hosting providers who deployed shared private or public cloud solutions using Hyper-V virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 had to create their own chargeback solutions from scratch. Such solutions typically were implemented by polling performance counters for processing, memory, storage, and networking. With the new built-in resource metering capabilities in Windows Server 2012, however, these organizations
can use Windows PowerShell to collect and report on historical resource usage of the following metrics:

■ Average CPU usage by a VM

■ Average physical memory usage by a VM

■ Minimum physical memory usage by a VM

■ Maximum physical memory usage by a VM

■ Maximum amount of disk space allocated to a VM

■ Total incoming network traffic for a virtual network adapter

■ Total outgoing network traffic for a virtual network adapter

In addition, these metrics can be collected in a consistent fashion even when the VMs are moved between hosts using Live Migration or when their storage is moved using storage migration. And for billing of network usage, you can differentiate between billable Internet traffic and non-billable internal datacenter traffic by configuring network metering port ACLs.

Implementing resource metering

As an example, let’s use resource metering to measure resource usage for a VM on our
Hyper-V host. We’ll start by enabling resource metering for the VM SRV-A using the

Enable-VMResourceMetering cmdlet, and then we’ll verify that resource metering has been enabled by piping the output of the Get-VM cmdlet into the Format-List cmdlet:

Now we can use the Measure-VM cmdlet to report resource utilization data on our VM:

You also can create resource pools for reporting usage for different types of resources such as Processor, Ethernet, Memory or VHD. For example, you could create a new resource pool named PoolOne using the New-VMResourcePool cmdlet:

Then, once you’ve enabled resource metering on the new pool using the

Enable-VMResourceMetering cmdlet, you can use the Measure-VMResourceMetering cmdlet to report processor utilization for the pool. You also can use the Reset-VMResourceMetering cmdlet to reset the collection of resource metering data.

Resource metering data can be collected, retrieved and reported by combining different Windows PowerShell cmdlets using pipelines. To configure network metering port ACLs for differentiating different kinds of traffic, you can use the add-VMNetworkAdapterACL cmdlet.