Monitoring Bandwidth usage on virtual switch

[beovax]

Im trying to find a way to monitor the bandwidth used on each port on a virtual switch using esx 3.02. Is this possible? I dont mind using a thirdparty tool but im trying to avoid installing any network monitoring tools/agents inside the vm's

Thanks in advanced for any help and suggestions

[CiscoKid]

I have worked for clients that have used Solarwind's Orion to monitor the switchport statistics that are connected to the pNIC of the ESX servers. That will give you an accurate view of the bandwidth usage. If you have a newer Cisco switch you can use Cisco Network Assistant to receive ad-hoc statistics similar to Solarwind's Orion. In ESX3.5 there is an experimental option to enable NetFlow on the vSwitches that will allow you to drill down to see the protocol breakdown. Be forewarned that there is a performance impact as a result of enabling the NetFlow option. Hope this helps.

[beovax]

Thanks for the tip, ill give it a try. Is there any way I could use ESXTOP to monitor the bandwidth of each virtual nic??

[beckhamk]

Does any of this reporting allow you to view the usage based on ip?

[aqualityplace]

We decided to use netflow on the virtual switch. Works a treat!! depedning on the netflow appliance you use (just do a search on google) you can show usage based on IP, application etc

[ISD_Plc]

Hi,

I'm just looking into this could you let us know what sort of performance impact it had?

cheers

Harvey Dowler

IT Support Manager

Ideal Shopping Direct PLC

Registered Office: Ideal Home House, Newark Road, Peterborough, PE1 5WG, UK. Registered in England No. 1534758

www.idealshoppingdirect.tv, www.idealworld.tv,www.createandcraft.tv, www.idealvitality.tv, www.createandcraft.biz

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Netflow is not actually reading data from the virtual switch per say, but from the physical device you are using. To monitor the bandwidth of a vSwitch it must be connected to a pSwitch and you monitor the traffic over the switch port to get the bandwidth monitoring. If you have a vSwitch without a physical pNIC then all bets are off. You could also monitor this by sticking a virtual appliance between the vSwitch with the physical connection and one without a physical connection. I.e. a firewall, router, or gateway appliance would do this. THere is no current way to get data direct from the vSwitch. However, this should change if VMworld presentations are a hint to the future.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

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

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization