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This thread has a great write up relevant for hyper-V. But it is very hyper-V specific. It does not address how to measure cpu steal on Win servers in EC2 and RS Cloud environments (I have tried the steps there, and they do not apply -- the counters are not available,and I have not spotted similar counters with diff names)

Question is: How do I measure it on win2008 and win2012 servers hosted on EC2 and Rackspace clouds?

I understand there may be no explicit answer to this question (e.g. a performance counter or such may not be available on Xen). So then interpret the question in a more meta manner: "How do I measure CPU Steal?" As there appears to be no explicit way to measure it, what is an effective implicit way?

Additional: Like on other cloud platforms, you can spin up 5 instances on rackspace cloud, and see wildly different performance on each. Because.... noisy neighbors.... so how to directly measure this, from a CPU and networking perspective?

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Jonesome Reinstate Monica
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  • Your question _was_ answered there. – Michael Hampton Jan 09 '14 at 03:48
  • @MichaelHampton No, I am afraid it is not answered there. I already read that whole article, but it does not apply to Win servers on EC2 and RS cloud (if it did, would not have posted here!) – Jonesome Reinstate Monica Jan 09 '14 at 03:50
  • @samsmith Sure it does. "But you can only see that data on a Windows Hyper-V hypervisor." Rackspace and EC2 aren't running on the Hyper-V hypervisors (or ESXi), therefore it's not possible. – ceejayoz Jan 24 '14 at 17:18

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Per that thread, it's only available to Windows on ESXi 5+ or Hyper-V. It's not available to Windows on the Xen hypervisor, which powers both EC2 and Rackspace.

ceejayoz
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  • The question is a meta question: "How do I measure CPU Steal?" There appears to be no explicit way. So what is an effective implicit way? -- revving OP – Jonesome Reinstate Monica Jan 24 '14 at 20:55
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    That's funny, I can clearly see the CPU steal time on my EC2 instances...in Linux. – Michael Hampton Jan 24 '14 at 21:31
  • This answer is incorrect. Rackspace cloud servers most definitely do provide CPU steal counters. I'm looking at my server right now and `vmstat -s` shows `430184 stolen cpu ticks`. – Mxx Jan 25 '14 at 04:26
  • @Mxx You're running `vmstat -s` on a Windows machine, per the question title? – ceejayoz Jan 25 '14 at 08:00
  • @ceejayoz no, i'm running it on linux. But _Guest OS_ is irrelevant to the hypervisor. Your answer claims that Xen/Rackspace does not provide "cpu stolen" counters, which is wrong because I shown you proof that it does! As for how to see it in Windows, your answer also does not address that. – Mxx Jan 25 '14 at 19:25
  • @Mxx The question is "For EC2 and RackSpace Cloud: Is there **a Windows equivalent** of Unix 'CPU steal time'?" As the thread indicates, Hyper-V and ESXi 5+ give Windows guests data about CPU steal that are not available in Windows on other hypervisors. – ceejayoz Jan 25 '14 at 19:30
  • I think the problem with this answer is that the Xen hypervisor really does provide the information, but only to guest OSes which are supported to receive it. That pretty much means Linux. The answer seems to imply that Xen doesn't keep or expose the metric at all. – Michael Hampton Jan 25 '14 at 20:24
  • @MichaelHampton I'll add "on Windows" to the answer. – ceejayoz Jan 25 '14 at 20:38