Written on October 3, 2007 at 9:12 pm by jayb

Using ESXTOP to collect performance statistics

Filed under Technology, VMWARE no comments

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RTFM Reader and regular contributor, Michael Knight has contacted me with some experiences and resources concerning gathering performance statistics using esxtop at the Service Console. It’s taken me sometime to blog about this, as I have been so busy with other work – Sorry about that Michael. Anyway, this is what Michael found:

“I was recently involved in trying to troubleshoot a VM that was performing badly. During the investigation I was experimenting with methods of capturing statistics of the Host and resident VMs both from VC and ESX. I was interested in capturing the %RDY time of a VM to determine if the VM was being hindered by others on the same host. For some reason VC reports a ready time in milliseconds and not a percentage like ESXTOP which was hard to interpret easily.
Whilst tinkering I discovered that by running ESXTOP in batch capture mode for a period I could stop the capture and then load the data file straight into Microsoft’s Perfmon tool and then manipulate the various counters I was interested in if as the data was from a Windows machine. Obviously the VI3 platform has different counters but it using a familiar tool it was easier to track the info.
I have created a spreadsheet listing the available Perfmon counters. Some are self explanatory others lack detail at this time. The information captured looks more extensive than the interactive esxtop or VC performance data. ESXTOP batch mode can be invoked as esxtop -b > /tmp/myesxtop.csv
Please note that depending on your sample rate these files can grow very large.”

You can download Michael’s XL spreedsheet from here

Using ESXTOP to collect performance statistics
mikelaverick
Mon, 01 Oct 2007 09:49:39 GMT