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HOW TO:  Performance Monitor vSphere 4.x or 5.0

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)VMware and Virtualization Consultant
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EE Fellow, MVE, Expert of the Year 2021,2017-11, Scribe 2016-2012, Author of the Year 2018-6,2013-2012 VMware vExpert Pro, vExpert 2022-2011
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Got a vSphere 4.x or vSphere 5.0 performance issue? Read on
Got a vSphere 4.x or vSphere 5.0 performance issue? Read on

All the performance information for your vSphere 4.x or 5.0 environment is available from within vSphere vCenter, most performance monitoring tools, just present the information differently, the performance information has been obtained from vCenter Server monitoring your environment.

Performance Charts from VMware vSphere vCenter Server
Performance Charts from VMware vSphere vCenter Server
Performance Charts from VMware vSphere vCenter Server
A free application that can help you display and present the information.

Veeam Monitor for free

If you want a quick tool, to help you with wanting to know all the individual elements, then I would suggest using Veeam Monitor Free Edition

Veeam Monitor leverages Veeam Business View™ to enable performance monitoring, alerting and reporting for virtual machine groups based on criteria such as business unit, department, location, purpose, service-level agreement or any other criteria you define. This ability to perform business-centric monitoring helps to identify the business impact of a virtual infrastructure’s performance and respond accordingly. It also allows you to configure flexible alerts based on known server type characteristics and the potential business impact of an outage for more granular service-level management. You can also create targeted reports showing only the data relevant to specific business units, departments or types of server.

Source
 http://www.veeam.com/esxi-monitoring-free.html.


If you want to get down and dirty with the servers, then I would recommend the following documents


 Performance Monitoring and Analysis


Guest-based performance monitoring is an inaccurate and unhelpful means of evaluating performance in virtual deployments.  See Guest-based Performance Measurement for more inforamtion.  Monitoring and analysis of VMware ESX Server should be performed with esxtop and VirtualCenter.

esxtop is the tried-and-true means of collecting every performance stat  needed and making it available in a way that is conducive to analysis.  The best source of information on launching esxtop can be found in the Resource Management Guide (page 159). 

1. Check and correct CPU utilization: CPU Performance Analysis and Monitoring

2. Identify memory bottlenecks and remove: Memory Performance Analysis and Monitoring

3. Characterize storage performance and correct: Storage Performance Analysis and Monitoring

4. Understand and improve the network utilization profile: Network Performance Analysis and Monitoring

Within each of these articles are techniques for using counters from  VirtualCenter and esxtop.  Information on those counters is provided in

vCenter Performance Counters 
esxtop Performance Counters

Also, note that, while useless in collecting performance data, Perfmon  can help with analysis of large esxtop output files.  

Using Perfmon for esxtop-based Performance Analysis 

esxtop in network mode
The vSphere Client can indicate that VM network traffic is causing a 1 GB Ethernet adapter to have a 99% utilization rate. But strangely, it doesn't display which kind of traffic is going across the virtual networks, where it came from or where it's going.

To learn which traffic is going across a virtual network, there's another free tool for vSphere: Xangati for ESX, a virtual appliance that tracks conversations on the virtual network. It's great for troubleshooting any virtual network issue, analyzing virtual desktop infrastructure and correlating vCenter performance stats with virtual network stats.

http://xangati.com/try-it-free/ (free)

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)VMware and Virtualization Consultant
CERTIFIED EXPERT
EE Fellow, MVE, Expert of the Year 2021,2017-11, Scribe 2016-2012, Author of the Year 2018-6,2013-2012 VMware vExpert Pro, vExpert 2022-2011

Comments (24)

Commented:
Yes
patronTechnical consultant

Commented:
Thanks a lot for sharing such a great info..
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Commented:
@BKBIGB No problems!
sysnimdaIT Operations Manager

Commented:
Great Article! Thank you! 
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Commented:
Thanks for your kind words.

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