How to check the Performance of Storage disk & Network

[gmreddy]

Hi,

We have ESX 3.01. environment with 3 SAN partitions. Each partition have 300 GB, one is RAID 1 (for system drive) and remaining two are RAID 5 (for data). Now our system drive partition is almost full.

I have below queries:

1. What will be the performance if system drive (RAID 1 partition) is 90% full?

2. Is there any way to check the drive performance (read, write) from ESX box/VC?

3. How can I check the network performance (bandwidth usage)

Thanks in advance.

GMR

[vams]

HI GMR,

In this regards, you can monitor the basic performance issue from the VC>performance tab where you will get the CPU utilization in form of graphical chart as well as in numbers. It will show you the max, min and average utilization of the CPU.

And also regarding the network or disk performance you should have all the details of the hardware which you are using in your environment. Means what are the min and max requirements? What data transfer rate of HBA’s and NIC’s? and also their setting/configuration is play a major role to get better performance. http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_san_cfg.pdf In this .pdf you will get the other details in optimizing SAN storage performance chapter.

Also Vmware Corporation has some tools through that we can monitor the CPU, disk and network performance. Find here... http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx2_using_esxtop.pdf

I think this will definatly update you for the handling/monitoring performance issue in virtual environment.

[hank-ger]

hi,

login to your esx-host with putty an type "esxtop" .. press "d" for drive performance. you can see the writes & read per second.

"n" network; "m" memory . .

[opbz]

I have used iometer on the VM itself to measure throught put to the storage.

(). It will perform I/O

operations in order to stress your system. It will also examine the performance

of its I/O operations and their impact on the system.

Please review pg

10: "To test disk performance".

The two figures I am interested in are

the maximum throughput and the maximum I/O rate Please use the settings under

both sections and run the I/O tests

this should give you both read and write performance.