If you're a Windows administrator, you already know about and use task manager (taskman.exe), a handy little tool that's embedded in every Microsoft Windows operating system... it's there to help you on a daily basis and can be used to help you troubleshoot various scenarios that come up.

Task Manager is usually used for monitoring different processes, applications and resource usage in a Windows OS.  And over the years, it's changed and evolved into what is today.  However, during its evolution, Microsoft missed out on an opportunity to fully realize the Hyper-V role when it is installed and running.  When the server is used as a virtualization host server with Hyper-V, we'd expect the Task Manager to show resource consumption of things like the CPU utilization of virtual machines running on that host.  Unfortunately, that isn't currently the case.  Today, it only shows you the data from the Hyper-V host itself, and not the information from the individual virtual machines.  So if a VM goes berserk and starts eating up the CPU resources on your host, don't expect to see that information show up in Task Manager.

Or, maybe it can... thanks to Veeam.

The Veeam team has released a new free tool called Task Manager for Hyper-V which adds a new level of sophistication and power back into Task Manager running on a virtualized host server.  This free tool is an individual application which installs as an add-on to a Windows machine with the Hyper-V role turned on.  But what's even more cool is that this free tool doesn't even have to be installed on the machine.  This lightweight tool is so portable, it can run from any USB device for emergency troubleshooting!  Pretty cool, right?

According to Veeam, its free Task Manager for Hyper-V visualizes real-time performance data from your Hyper-V host and each child VM that's running on that host.  With it, you'll not only be able to view the resources being consumed by the parent partition of the virtualization host machine, but also the compute performance coming from your virtual machines as well.

Don't delay.  Download the free Veeam Task Manager tool today.