Irfan:

You mentioned at VMworld 2009 that you would like to see vscsiStats included in vCenter. Do you know if this is going to happen? Soon? If not soon, then will there be an ESXi version? My recommendation to roll-out ESX 4.0 vs. ESXi 4.0 would be influenced by the availability of vscsiStats-like data gathering.

Thanks.

Irfan:

I am getting ready to roll out vSphere and still debating ESX vs. ESXi. There is no problem at this time, I just want to be prepared if we encounter performance problems.

Will do.

Thanks.

Oct 7, 2009 9:37 AM irfan.ahmad   says: in response to: lamw

lamw: see my response to aenagy of Sep 17.

How can I link the worldgroupIds and virtual disk handleIDs to objects in the rest of the world? I could of course find e.g. the VM uuid by doing a lookup using SOAP for that machine, but what about the disks if e.g. a VM uses more than one disk?

Not really. What I see for e.g. a virtual machine that uses 2 hard disks (one on iSCSI and one on NFS) is:# /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -l
Virtual Machine worldGroupID: 1144, Virtual Machine Display Name: Probe {
Virtual SCSI Disk handleID: 8200
Virtual SCSI Disk handleID: 8210
}

The histograms refer to the worldGroupID and handleID, but how do I know if 8200 is the iSCSI or the NFS disk?

Great! So I could do the following to find this:
1) find the hardware for the VM (e.g. via /mob/?moid=3904&doPath=config.hardware)
2) iterate over the virtual devices and find those of type VirtualDisk and look at their deviceInfo.label (e.g. "Hard Disk 1")
3) for these devices look at the backing.datastore to find out on which datastore they are located

and then map the datastores to the handleIDs in the same order.

Works for me as long as users can't change the labels of the devices (can they)? Or should I rely on the key attribute instead (first disk aways seems to have 2000, next one 2001 etc).

Thanks for the help and have a great weekend!

Dec 19, 2009 9:05 PM lamw   says: in response to: nkiesel

If what @irfan.ahmad says is true about the the mapping of vscsiStats output to VMDK order in the VM configuration, then as @nkiesel pointed out this can easily be retrieved usign the VI/vSphere API.

@nkiesel, There is a unique key for each Device that is kept track on a per VM basis, hence you may see repetitive values such as 2000,2001,etc. as VMDK(s) afaik starts at 2000 and increments by 1 and actuallyt he users can change the labels to whatever their heart desires, if the order is kept upon the creation of the devices then it should be trivial to map.

Here is a script I wrote awhile back that retrieves some info about VM's disk, I've added an additional attribute to capture the VMDK SCSI adapter and target value (SCSI X:Y).

Take a look here for more details: getVMDiskInfo.pl

Here's an example:

script output:

[vi-admin@scofield ~] $ ./getVMDiskInfo.pl --server reflex.primp-industries.com --username primp

esxi4-1
        Hard disk 1 = [himalaya-local-SATA.RE4-GP:Storage] esxi4-1/esxi4-1.vmdk
        Hard disk 1 = isThinProvsioned
        Hard disk 1 = persistent
        Hard disk 1 = VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo
        Hard disk 1 = SCSI(0:0)

        Hard disk 2 = [himalaya-local-SATA.RE4-GP:Storage] esxi4-1/esxi4-1_1.vmdk
        Hard disk 2 = isThinProvsioned
        Hard disk 2 = persistent
        Hard disk 2 = VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo
        Hard disk 2 = SCSI(3:13)

        Hard disk 3 = [himalaya-local-SATA.RE4-GP:Storage] esxi4-1/esxi4-1_2.vmdk
        Hard disk 3 = isThinProvsioned
        Hard disk 3 = persistent
        Hard disk 3 = VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo
        Hard disk 3 = SCSI(3:2)

        Hard disk 4 = [himalaya-local-SATA.RE4-GP:Storage] esxi4-1/esxi4-1_3.vmdk
        Hard disk 4 = isThinProvsioned
        Hard disk 4 = persistent
        Hard disk 4 = VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo
        Hard disk 4 = SCSI(0:4)

        Hard disk 5 = [himalaya-local-SATA.RE4-GP:Storage] esxi4-1/esxi4-1_4.vmdk
        Hard disk 5 = isThinProvsioned
        Hard disk 5 = persistent
        Hard disk 5 = VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo
        Hard disk 5 = SCSI(2:5)

[root@himalaya ~]# /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -l

.....

Virtual Machine worldGroupID: 40133, Virtual Machine Display Name: esxi4-1 {
   Virtual SCSI Disk handleID: 8578
   Virtual SCSI Disk handleID: 8579
   Virtual SCSI Disk handleID: 8580
   Virtual SCSI Disk handleID: 8581
   Virtual SCSI Disk handleID: 8582
}

=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at: http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/
Twitter: @lamw
vGhetto Script Repository
Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)
Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
VMware Developer Comuunity



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Dec 22, 2009 10:57 AM irfan.ahmad   says: in response to: nkiesel

All virtual disks have vscsi handles (and therefore handle IDs).

If you suspend/resume, vmotion/svmotion or initiate any other such operations that require registration of virtual disks, of course, the IDs will change.

These IDs are really just opaque identifiers to uniquely identify virtual disks and you should not infer any semantics from them since the semantics are likely to change in the future.

Irfan

Yeah, thanks for the clarification. Would still be helpful if there were somewhere an explicit mapping between the vSCSI handleIDs and the VirtualDisk object accessible via mob/SOAP (I mean other then the ordering of the Ids which I'm using right now).

Anyway, thanks a lot for all the comments. Oh, and am I correct to assume that the unit for the ioLength histograms is bytes, and that the "mean" is calculated over the real length of the packets and not from the histogram?

</nk>

Just one last question- hopefully before you go in your (I'm sure well-deserved) vacation: how is the mean calculated? Is that the same as the average (i.e. sum of all packet sizes divided by number of packets?)

</nk>

Hi,

I heard rumors that the next version of ESX (ESX 4.1 ?) will have NFS stats available via SOAP. Any idea if is that correct?

Best,
Norbert

Hey, don't blame me for trying

Fair enough. Of course the next logical question is: what does it take to get a hand on a development (or beta) version?

Best,
Norbert

Jan 20, 2010 2:39 PM akutz   says: in response to: irfan.ahmad

I've come up with a way to map the VMDKs to HandleIDs in a conclusive manner (takes time into account): http://communities.vmware.com/message/1460390#1460390