What tool is best for gathering VMware performance stats on a frequent basis (1-5 minute intervals) and exporting to CSV for analysis? I have been playing with vSphere PowerCLI, but our performance group currently uses Linux with a lot of perl scripts and such running on RHEL to gather performance data and perform analysis on our physical servers so vCLI on a RHEL box or vMA may be a better option. I know PowerCLI can gather historical stats from the vCenter DB, but I am not sure that you can do that using vCLI with esxtop/resxtop. If we have to constantly run esxtop/resxtop to gather stats from our ESXi hosts what kind of performance hit would there be on the servers? Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
