I'm in the situation of setting up a new vSphere server and want to watch it to check it directly via CLI to keep an eye on its maintenance activities for a few days, that it's not hanging, that hypervisor activity is running nicely etc. The web UI gives me graphs and task info gives me percentages, but both of those aren't really what I need - the graphs aren't specific as to what files/processes are doing what and the percentages often stall at a fixed value for many hours before jumping forward (eg when staging or remediating) so I can't be sure it's doing anything in the background. Also everything except CLI runs on a server/client basis on a different machine, whereas CLI runs on the relevant host directly, cutting out scope for confusion and issues.
On Windows I can use Resource Monitor or Task manager to watch individual processes, and their disk or network IO (latest bytes/sec delta for each process), and in resource monitor I can watch exactly which files are in use and what's being done with them, pretty much. On BSD and Linux, iostat and similar give much the same ability.
Is there an equivalent way to get this insight using CLI on ESXi 5.5 or 6.0, and if so, what is it? Or how do other people handle it if they want to check in detail what the server is doing during maintenance and that it isn't hanging or silently stalled due to IO/networking/SAN connectivity issues?
