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gilesm
Contributor
Contributor

Invalid performance counter values starting with vSphere 5?

Has anyone noticed any oddities with performance counters and vSphere 5? Specifically, I'm seeing two problmes:

  • Historical metrics:
    • Querying cluster metrics and specifying a 5 minute interval is no longer working. In previous versions of vCenter I could specify that I want metrics from 5 minutes ago and everything worked fine. Now, nothing is returned. If you make the interval 6 minutes or higher, something is returned. And no, this isn't a sample interval problem. If you refresh the vSphere client UI, you'll see that values are recorded every 5 minutes.
    • After querying Cluster metrics for an indeterminate period of time, the last value in a particular PerMetricSeriesCSV is zero. So after a number of queries, I start getting zero for the latest value. If you look at the vSphere client, you can see the behavior. The last data point drops to zero at the end of the graph. After awhile, the data point for that timestamp is displayed with its correct value in the client (and with a future query). It is almost as if something is delayed and the counter isn't available for query yet.
  • Real-time metrics:
    • If I query real-time metrics long enough, I start getting zeros for the latest instance value as well here (like above example).

The weirdness is that this behavior is NOT consistent. Sometimes the above queries work just fine for a period of time (except for the 5 minute interval stuff. That is just broken altogether). And then later things go haywire, then they go back to valid values. This is all running on a GA version of vSphere running in an ESXi 5 Cluster with two reasonably strong hosts (a lab setup of course). This cluster only has 2 running VMs and they are very small WIndows 2K3 systems. So there is almost ZERO load on the hosts at any given time. But, I get the same behavior with an ESXi 4.1 Cluster as well with a loaded environment. So, it doesn't appear that ESXi version is a problem (this didn't happen on a vCenter 4.1 at all). Just curious if anyone is seeing this behavior as well. Thanks.

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nithinvishwa19
Contributor
Contributor

Hi gilesm,

Even I have noticed this very wierd behaviour of  VC5 Cluster. I have also observed that if we batch the performance queries of Host and Cluster together, the data is not returned for cluster. The same has been for a batched operation consisting of query for Resource pool and VM. It would be great if i can get any leads to resolve this issue.

Thanks

Nithin

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aathif
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same issues while retrieving cpu.usagemhz.average and other perf counter for clusters configured on vSphere 5. The data returned seem to be staggered, with a lot of missing points. Can anyone from vmware confirm is this is a bug.

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Steve_Jin
Expert
Expert

I think it could be a bug. Workload on the ESXi is not the issue, but vCenter/DB is. You may want to file a bug with VMware tech support.

Steve JIN Author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK; Creator of open source VI Java API (http://vijava.sf.net); Blogger at http://www.doublecloud.org
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