I apologize if these sorts of questions have been asked hundreds of times, but here's what I'm wrestling with, and I'm very new to VMWare.
We are doing some performance measurements of applications running as VM's on ESXi 4.1.0 hosts, which are a part of a cluster managed by vCenter.
At the VM (guest) level, I am collecting performance metrics using nmon; the guests are RHEL. However, I've been asked to collect similar data at the host level: specifically things like cpu busy, wait%, memory utilization, network Mbps and disk io rates, and furnish the data as either an .xls file or .csv file.
My initial inclination was to run 'esxtop' in batch mode, but the file is simply enormous, especially because we have so many logical cpus enabled. I'd rather try to get what I need out of vCenter and the vSphere client view, and do a "save as" as an .xls file, if this will be possible.
However, I notice a couple things....
First, the counters seem limited in any selection but 'real-time.' If I choose CPU for example in the view: Host -> Performance -> Advanced -> Chart Options, I only get "Usage" and "Usage in MHz" in any time range except for "Real-time". I also don't see where the granularity can be changed.
Second is it possible to combine metrics into a single chart that can be exported? For example, if I have 8 ESXi hosts, I don't mind setting up or launching 8 different collections, but it's tedious if I have to create a bunch of individual charts for each of the 8 hosts -- ie, one chart for CPU, one chart for memory....
I'd appreciate any insights or suggestions on this workflow.
Many thanks!
