VMware: Create performance logging with ‘esxtop’ and view with ‘perfmon’ – Part 1

You can monitor/check your ESX performance with esxtop, by generating a share to your vCenter Server and view the results with Perfmon you can follow this article.

Create Credentials:

1. I created a new share on my vCenter 2003 on E:\Logging\

2. I created a new user with username: Logging and password: Logging

3. On the new created folder I add the Logging account with full permissions to the security rights:

Open ESX Firewall:

Open “SMB Client” (ports tcp/137-139,445) in ESX Firewall to reach the Windows share.

Configuration:

Logon your console or Putty with root rights for continue the configuration,

Create a new folder to store your .csv results:

mkdir /mnt/logging

Create the Windows mount point:

mount -t cifs //172.16.254.203/Logging -o username=Logging,password=Logging/mnt/logging

Make sure your ESX firewall settings already set, if not you receive this error:

mount error 111 = Connection refused
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

Diagnostics:

ESXTOP options:

esxtop [-] [h] [v] [b] [s] [R vm-support_dir_path] [d delay] [n iter]

After this you can set the esxtop parameters to run the diagnostics and reschedule or run once the in batch mode:

esxtop –b –d 3 –n 20 >/mnt/logging/ESX.csv

Little note: make sure your NTP settings are correct

You can stop/kill the batchmode with CTRL + C

Results:

The results are collected in E:\Logging\ESX.csv on my vCenter server:

With a few days I’ll finish part II to read the .csv with Perfmon and make some scheduled tasks with the esxtop overview.

More information: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279

More information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx2_using_esxtop.pdf

Source: Matthijs van den Berg – B3RG.nl

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Sander

Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant / Technical Project Lead at Unica ICT Solutions. Sander has 15+ years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, security and modern worksplace.

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