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.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 2, 2010 in Featured, Training, VMware, vSphere | View Comments
It has been suggested by many and is going to be available to the public very soon. Thanks to the hard work and persistence of Scott Drummonds the class is going through the Train the Trainer process currently. Once the trainers are up to speed the class will become available to the general public.
You can see the Course description, schedule and datasheet here.
Course Description: This hands-on training course explores the management of performance in a VMware vSphere™ environment. It provides the knowledge and skills necessary to make fundamental design decisions that enhance performance and to meet performance goals in an already-deployed vSphere installation. The course is based on VMware® ESX™ 4.0, ESXi 4.0, and vCenter™ Server 4.0.
Module Outline:
Module 1: Course Introduction
Module 2: Performance in a Virtualized Environment
• Discuss the vSphere performance troubleshooting methodology
• Discuss software and hardware virtualization techniques and their impact on performance
• Monitor performance using vCenter Server performance charts and the ESX/ESXi resxtop command
Module 3: CPU Performance
• Discuss the CPU scheduler and other features that have an impact on CPU performance• Monitor key CPU performance metrics
• Troubleshoot common CPU performance problems
Module 4: Memory Performance
• Discuss memory reclamation techniques and memory overcommitment
• Monitor key memory performance metrics
• Troubleshoot common memory performance problems
Module 5: Guidelines for DRS and Resource Controls• Discuss performance guidelines for DRS clusters, resource pools, and resource allocation settings
Module 6: Network Performance
• Discuss the performance features of modern network adapters
• Monitor key network performance metrics• Troubleshoot common network performance problems
Module 7: Storage Performance
• Discuss how storage protocols, VMware vStorage VMFS configuration, load balancing, and queuing affect performance
• Monitor key storage performance metrics
• Troubleshoot common storage performance problems
Module 8: Virtual Machine Performance• Discuss guidelines for configuring a virtual machine for optimal performance
Module 9: Application Performance
• Discuss tools and guidelines for application performance
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Posted by admin on Sep 15, 2009 in VMware | View Comments
Today VMware dropped a whitepaper on the big bump in performance of the VMXNET3 virtual network device used in vSphere. It overs a significant performance increase over the previous version under several configurations and protocols. Along with the performance gains it reduces overhead on the CPU usuage.
Some highlights of this paper are:
(1) Throughput gains of up to 92% for 10G TCP/IPv4 Rx workloads with large socket buffer, which greatly improves bulk data transfer performance in a data center environment.
(2) Dramatic gains across all configurations of IPv6 traffic, with significant CPU usage reduction and throughput improvement over enhanced VMXNET2.
You can see the new relases here and download the whitepaper here.
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