I am training to be a DBA in a company running about 30 machines with MS SQL Server (2000 and 2005). Last week I went to a class where the instructor recommended establishing a performance baseline using windows performance monitor. He also advised to run perfmon remotely so as to not effect the performance. What I am wondering is since I have so many different machines to baseline, can I run perfmon on one box, using a seperate counter log for each server? I would like to get a nice week-long baseline for each machine, but I also don't want to get bad data by running too many logs at the same time. If anyone has experience in this area, I would appreciate any advice that you might have. Thanks, Matt

There are a lot of "Depends" here. First,a SQL forum would be a better place to ask about SQL baseline logs than an Exchange forum, but oh well. First, it depends on how many counters you are looking at. If you are going to do a few counters such as Processsor usage, disk counters such as percent free time and queue lengths, along with RAM usage, you should be able to do several servers at once. Just keep in mind that when you do your next tests a few months from now to repeat the process the same way you baselined then. Now, if you are going to crank up Perfmon on all sql counters, and a lot of other counters, it would be better to run a baseline on one server at a time. Also keep in mind the interval you are collecting. One time a minute does not take as much resources as every few seconds does.

Thanks for the response,John. I meant to post this in a general sysadmin forum instead of an exchange forum- sorry about that. I was thinking about just doing a few counters (basically the same ones you have listed). My hope is to have something to use for comparison if there is a performance issue in the future. I am going to post this in another forum to see if anyone else has anything to add. Again, thanks for your help.