Measuring Performance - A little more than the basics...

[hutchingsp]

We have a 2 host ESX cluster (3.5U1).

I keep an eye on performance using the various charts in Virtual Centre, and I also occasionally run esxtop to check that I'm not seeing queues/bottlenecks etc.

My question is, should I be regularly collecting/analyzing specific counters, and if so which ones and what is the recommended way of capturing and analysing them?

From my and my users POV there is no perception of anything being slow, we're at very low CPU utilization, have plenty of free RAM, and I've never seen esxtop report any sort of HBA/IO bottleneck to/from the SAN and to be blunt I guess I'm almost wondering if I'm being a bit too complacent in assuming everything is buzzing along as quickly as it could possibly be.

Appreciate any input - from the reading I've done so far there doesn't seem to be any obvious "middle ground", it's either the basic stats on the Performance tab in VC or it's picking through logs and esxtop from the console?

[Troy_Clavell]

sounds like your enviornment is running very well, which is great.

You might wan to look a vKernel's Capacity Analyzer. It's a pretty good utility and it will not only report on your enviornment now, but also give you some projections.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Tools like vFoglight and the vKernel tool are the next ones I would consider for your environment. See which works best for you. For free tools look at vmktree (http://vmktree.org). It rolls up the data differently.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

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