After all the preconfigurations, installations, and setting up of virtual machines, everything is up and running normally. However, what you really need to consider is what is normal. What is the regular performance and system utilization for your physical and virtual servers?

Logged monitoring will help you to answer the question, measure realistic conditions, and identify the needs of servers and hardware upgrades, optimization, and tunings using trend analysis. This is an example of what you can get using baselines. A baseline is the level of system performance that you decide is acceptable. Normally, they are decided before deployment during the planning phases.

Using data collector sets from Perfmon, you can get realistic and advanced trend information and create baselines that can start and stop automatically based on your schedule.

This recipe will show you how to use Perfmon to create baselines for your physical and virtual machines.