Total Server Memory and Target Server Memory Value Same – SQL Server 2008 R2

Aaron Bertrand wrote a good post on it that is pretty detailed...How I use PowerShell to collect Performance Counter data.

Then Laerte Junior has an excelent walk through on how he finds the counters he wants in a Simple-Talk article: Gathering Perfmon Data with Powershell. This might be where you want to start. It has some cmdlets that he uses to capture the counters for a particular instance I believe.

See if this is what you need:

$listofmetrics = (Get-Counter -ListSet "*Databases" -ComputerName $hostname).Counter | Where {$_ -like "*\Transactions/sec"}
$listofmetrics | Get-Counter

Value Buffer pool target is not in amount of 8 KB pages but the Is actually number of pages which you were correct to assume . So as per output the target buffer pool memory is would be 8*32751616 which comes to 249G. Which is really absurd

Reason:

Now for reason why Bpool target is showing value 250 G in DBCC MEMORYSTATUS and memory manager is showing 12 G as Target committed is because the Counter SQL Server Buffer Manager: target Pages is DEPRECATED from SQL Server 2012 onwards. Microsoft did not specifically mentioned this anywhere but I found it from SQL Server Buffer Manager Object BOL Document. If you read this article you wont find counter target pages because its deprecated. You would also see the same counter present in SQL Server 2008 R2.

Other reason may be I assume your system is NUMA system with NUMA nodes. I am sure if you see MEMORYSTATUS output it would have memory allocation breakdown for various nodes like Node0, Node 1...Node 64. So target includes target memory allocation for all NUMA nodes. If you note Buffer pool in MEMORYSTATUS output, it has single entry and is not restricted to particular node. Plus this value is calculated during startup and does not actually shows correct value after a period of time so you should not refer to it. Instead refer to memory manager output

Edit:

As per question regarding buffer pool target pages on NUMA node believe me its not showing correct value for buffer pool. For my system with 4 G of RAM target pages are 7979008 with almost nothing running on the system. This is totally absurd and I would request you not to look at this counter. I had a chat with one of the experts on this field to confirm the behavior and he told me you should avoid looking at buffer pool output and target pages specially on NUMA system its calculation( way of calculation) is not correct. I can raise a connect Item but it would take few months to get response from MS team.

Not every thing in DBCC MEMORYSTATUS output matters to normal users many things are internal to MS and they would just not give any information regarding the same. If you want to monitor SQL Server memory usage please use below query.

select
(physical_memory_in_use_kb/1024)Memory_usedby_Sqlserver_MB,
(locked_page_allocations_kb/1024 )Locked_pages_used_Sqlserver_MB,
(total_virtual_address_space_kb/1024 )Total_VAS_in_MB,
process_physical_memory_low,
process_virtual_memory_low
from sys. dm_os_process_memory

If you really want to monitor SQL Server target memory I would suggest you to look at

SQLServer:memory Manager--Target Server Memory: This is amount of memory SQL Server is trying to acquire.

SQLServer:memory Manager--Total Server memory This is current memory SQL Server has acquired.

There are other counters as well you can get from This Link.

Few other interesting counters are

Page reads/sec – Number of physical database page reads that are issued per second. This statistic displays the total number of physical page reads across all databases. Because physical I/O is expensive, you may be able to minimize the cost, either by using a larger data cache, intelligent indexes, and more efficient queries, or by changing the database design

Free List Stalls/sec – Number of requests per second that had to wait for a free page

PS: Please let me know if I have missed anything or if something is not clear

Edit: Here is the Connect Item for your issue lets wait what MS folks have to say about it. Please vote it