New PID feature - Does VMWare track it?

[DKeim]

I don't know where to enter this, but I have a suggestion unless it is already happening.

Right now, if you look at activities on the host, you can not really tell which client is which. If VMWare could store the PID somewhere, then a person could easily tell which client is drawing more memory or CPU.

It would be nice if VMWare settings showed the PID for each of the running clients.    Mac shows us the activity, but unless you keep track of which VM client you started, I can't see how you can investigate usage.

Is there already someplace that does this?

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Nope, there's no such functionality in the GUI at the moment.

However you can get it via the command line.

Just run:

$ ps ax | grep vmware-vmx

and it will show you a details on the vmware-vmx processes currently running and one of the columns does include the vmx file that belongs to the PID.

Not ideal as it is not in the GUI, but it will help you determine what PID is for what VM.

--

Wil

[DKeim]

I am not a Unix/Linux guru so I do not know what I can or cannot do with "ps", but maybe there is a way to display only part of the information, such as JUST the PID and the column that shows the vmx file. 

[RDPetruska]

Not sure about running on a Mac, but there is a C command line program I use in one of my unreleased utilities called "pipelist2", which lists all running processes with the actual file listed - for running VMs it shows the path and file of the vmx file.

[wila]

Hi,

It is possible to write that, one could even develop a GUI for it, but ... that takes time and effort.

Best that can be done as long as I can see is:

ps x -o "pid command" | grep [v]mx

That drops a few columns, but the command line is quite long.

You can filter out a bit more by using awk, but as the command line has spaces it isn't as easy to filter and even by displaying the last 2 columns the result isn't very pretty.

ps x -o "pid args" | awk '{print $1 "\t" $(NF-1) " " $(NF)}' | grep [v]mx

Perhaps it can be done using awk, but I wouldn't know without spending time on researching that.

--

Wil

[wila]

Hi,

So instead of working on what I should have done I played a bit with awk...

One of the things I noticed in the output was that the last argument that I was after was just after a string "-D 4" so I search for that and filter some more.

ps x -o "pid command" | awk '{ match($0,"D 4");print $1 substr($0,RSTART+2,length($0)) }' | grep [v]mx

This works for me, not sure if it is universal enough to work everywhere, but seems it works for me for Fusion 7 up to Fusion 8.5

Also see attachment for a scripted version so you do not have to remember that mish mash from above.

( vmware-show-pid.sh )

--

Wil

[Mikero]

Intresting feature request... I like it.

Make the UI show the PID of associated vmware-vmx process... makes perfect sense.

We're focusing a lot around power-user and developer related features, so this is well received.