Here is a quick cheat sheet for the vMA (if you need it).
- The default user name is vi-admin password is set on install
- To add an esx host type vifp addserver <your esxhostname.company.com>
- To show a quick list of your servers vifp listservers
- To initialize a connection to a particular host type vifpinit esxhostname.company.com
- To capture logs from an esx host type vilogger enable –server <fqdn of esxhost you want to monitor> –numrotation 30 –maxfilesize 1023 –collectionperiod 100
How can I launch resxtop remotely?
$resxtop –server <fqdn of your vCenter> –vihost <fqdn of esxhost you want to monitor> –username <your username to login Virtual Center>
(Note: you will be prompted for your password)
How can I run resxtop in batch mode and store all that in a .csv ? The command below batches it takes 60 samples every 5 seconds then stores it in a file named data.csv
$resxtop -b -a -n 60 –server <fqdn of your virtualcenter server> –vihost <fqdn of your esxhost> –username (for your virtualcenter)
Why would I ever want to run resxtops when this stuff is in vCenter? lol.
Some quick notes now that were in esxtops remotely using the vMA….
1) resxtops updates every 5 seconds to delay it type s then the refresh interval (20 would be 20 seconds)
2) Type V to just show virtual machines
3) To drill down into a virtual machine and look at the worlds type e then the gid
4) typing c will bring up cpu, m will bring up memory, d will bring up disk and n will bring up network
Troubleshooting CPU Problems on ESX Hosts and VMs
The first thing you should do is look at your physical ESX host CPU
Again, Typing c will bring the CPU section of resxtops you can add and remove and rearrange fields typing f
Look at your PCPU UTIL -% if the average is over 75% or peaks >90% it is very possible ESX host CPU is saturated; service console runs at PCPU 0
The 2nd thing you should do is check Cpu Ready of your VMs if your CPU ready is for most vms is hovering around 20% or higher they are waiting too long for CPU either adjust resource pool or vmotion to a different host.
The third thing I would do it look at individual VMs CPU %USED and %RDY. A high ready could be because the host or a resource pool make adjustments accordingly, a high %used like 75% or higher might be a sign to give it another cpu. However is your application SMP friendly?
Does this VM really need 2 CPUs?
If it does it should be using them….right?
To check if the VM is really making use of the cpus you gave it expand a world of a VM. Look at your vCPU( again from the resxtops cpu view type e then the gid of your vm)….if one of the vCPU is very low and one a lot higher chances are your virtual machine isn’t symetric multiprocessing and you should remove a cpu. Giving CPUs to a VirtualMachine that isnt Symetric Multiprocessing is bad for performance….
What about swapping?
To check swapping look at the %SWPWT column above 5% performance of the VM will degrade significantly
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