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amills
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Lots of IOPs, but which VM?

I recently swapped out my old LeftHand for a Sun 7110 SAS array, attached via NFS. I'm seeing substantially improved performance, but recently my ESX cluster has started to hammer the storage again (~4300 IOPs). I'm trying to find out if any single vm is to blame but I'm having difficulty. esxtop doesn't seem to provide the information I'm looking for - disk resources aren't displayed on a per-vm basis. I've got 77 vms on this array so right now it's a bit like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles.

Is it possible to get a display of how many IOPs each vm is using? (or something approximate?)

Thanks.

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RParker
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esxtop has a built in help, try '?'

It will explain that if you press 'd' for disk it will display disk activity for that ESX host.

It will further explain that if you press 'E' you can expand that vmhba adapter (and this you should know to list VM's on that adapter).

So when you expand the vmhba you will see a list of VM's and their appropriate disk activity, next to each one.

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lamw
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This document is your friend: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279 and check out Section 4

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

RParker
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esxtop has a built in help, try '?'

It will explain that if you press 'd' for disk it will display disk activity for that ESX host.

It will further explain that if you press 'E' you can expand that vmhba adapter (and this you should know to list VM's on that adapter).

So when you expand the vmhba you will see a list of VM's and their appropriate disk activity, next to each one.

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amills
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Ah, it appears I missed the expand/rollup section. I've been through esxtop a bunch of times but had difficulty figureing out which storage adapter = the NFS server. This is what I needed. Thanks for your help.

==

EDIT:

Actually - I don't see where the statistics for the VMs that are located on my NFS data store are. esxtop is only reporting data for local and iscsi storage. When I look at the "device" column in the VIC, it just shows name of the server and path to the NFS data store. The impression I'm getting is that you can't get IO data for VMs on an NFS share. There must be something I'm missing.

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amills
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So when you expand the vmhba you will see a list of VM's and their appropriate disk activity, next to each one.

Which adapter are the NFS VMs stored on? This is non-obvious.

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amills
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I opened a ticket with VMWare. Long story short, there isn't a mechanism to determine per-VM IO over an NFS data store, or even how much NFS bandwidth each VM is using.

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natewilson
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I know this is an old post, but I'm looking into buying that Sun 7110 unit, and I'm wondering if you found a way to analyze your performance. I am struggling with similar issues with my Linux NFS server, and hoping that the Sun unit would offer better capabilities.

The 7110 is supposed to have very good performance analysis capabilities, with dtrace & all, were you able to figure out anything from that direction? Can the 7110 can tell you which client or even which file is causing the load?

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TheEsp
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Hi

If you have the 7110 I know it has some funky software called "analytics" which should be able to tell you want VM is causing the IOPs.

Regards

David

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