Tools

How to use ESXplot to read your ESXTop reports

Posted by Brian on Mar 4, 2010 in Featured, Performance, Tools, Troubleshooting, VMware | View Comments

By now everyone should know that esxtop is a great tool that you can use to find out what might be causing performance issues on your ESX host. I don’t plan on writing a post on how to use esxtop. You can refer to Duncan’s ESXtop post for details on thresholds or to VMwares esxtop bible for good base information.

This post is more of a starting point on what ESXplot is and how to install and use. By now most of you should know that ESXplot was born out of the mind of Geoff White of VMware. Geoff is a coworker of Scott Drummonds the well known ESX performance expert.  Esxplot is a GUI application that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program takes a single command line argument which is the esxtop batch mode output file.

Why would you want to use esxplot? Well in the past your options to examine these files were to use Excel or Perfmon. Both options were very slow, sometimes taking hours to import the file before viewing. With esxplot your dump file will open within seconds usually. For more details you can read Scott’s post on version 1.0.

If you are using Windows to view your files you have 2 options. You can use the Windows binary file or run the python script. If you wish to run the python script you will need the following applications installed.
Python 2.6 or higher but not Python 3.x – Download
wxPython – Download
NumPy is also needed – Download

Once installed the application is very easy to use. First thing to do in capture some data from esxtop in batch mode using the command below. Then copy the file over to your workstation that you will run esxplot on. Open the app and the File ->Import->Dataset option from the menu to view your file. Then from the lower left section that will list your Hosts name open the tree to view all the captured values.

esxtop -b -d 2 -n 100> esxtopcapturefile.csv

You can download esxplot from here.

RVTools is updated to 2.8.1

Posted by admin on Feb 21, 2010 in Tools | View Comments

The wonderful free tool from Rob was updated to a new version. You can download RVTools from his website. Be sure to thank the developer for all of his hard work.

• On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
• On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
• Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
• When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
• When datastore name or virtual machine name contains spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
• Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.

You should try RVTools if your not using it already

Posted by admin on Sep 12, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

I know that RVTools has been around for awhile, but for those of you who have not had a look at this tool should download it. Its a nice little tool that you can install on your workstation and point it to your Virtual Center server or a single ESX host. The app then pulls down a ton of valuable information about your virtual machines and different status items about the ESX host. Most of these settings can be adjusted to meet your thresholds.

To list just a few of the items you can look at. You can see a list of VM’s with expired VM tools, datastores with low free space and many other settings.

You can download this tool from Rob’s site here. The application is free but be sure to spread the word and you can toss him a few dollars on paypal also.