Performance By Design

This post is a prequel to a recent one on correcting the Process(*)\% Processor Time counters on a Windows guest machine . To assess the overall impact of the VMware virtualization environment on the accuracy of the performance measurements available for Windows guest machines, it is necessary to first understand how VMware affects the clocks and timers that are available on the guest machine. Basically, VMware virtualizes all calls made from the guest OS to hardware-based clock and timer services on the VMware Host. A VMware white paper entitled “ Timekeeping in VMware Virtual Machines ” contains an extended discussion of the clock and timer distortions that occur in Windows guest machines when there are virtual machine scheduling delays. These clock and timer services distortions, in turn, cause distortion among a considerably large set of Windows performance counters, depending on the specific type of performance counter. (The different types of performance counters are described