More recent SAPOSCOL implementations of SAP are using the ‘Processor Information’ counters to be able to represent the values correctly on servers with more than 64 CPUs. The counters under the ‘Processor’ collection only allowed to see results on a per CPU granularity, the new collection will allow to monitor counters on a per NUMA node level as well. A change was introduced as well in the granularity one could monitor those counters. The counters of this new collection will support the new architecture which enables >64 CPU. This new collection of counters just shows up underneath the old ‘Processor’ collection as seen in this screen shot. The new collection shows up in Performance Monitor under ‘Processor Information’. In order to maintain compatibility for software accessing the performance counters as those were introduced more than a decade ago, the Windows development team decided to leave the old performance counters untouched and have those available with the old restriction of 64 processors and instead introduce a new collection of performance counters which will support more than 64 processors. A very good paper around this whole area got published here: Behind this simple change there is a lot of coding and optimization hidden to act fast enough to get the CPU frequency up again when load is applied or optimizing the times a CPU can remain on lower frequency.

This change will allow the Windows OS to take down the frequency of the CPUs in case the CPUs are not loaded. So far the default always was the ‘High-Performance’ power mode. However we are only supporting 256 CPUs today as there are no servers available for us to test anything higher than 256 CPUs.Īnother very small change made by the development team was to install Windows 2008 R2 with the ‘Balanced Power mode’ as the default power mode. The architecture introduced to get beyond 64 CPUs can support way more CPUs ( Windows Server 2008 R2 enabled support of up to 256 CPUs. However besides these changes, there were some more which have implications in how we need to look at the CPU consumption on a server running Windows Server 2008 R2. There were massive changes in this Windows release in the area of Virtualization.

SAP will soon support Windows Server 2008 R2.

Windows 2008 process monitor