The ability to monitor performance of the connections between the endpoints and the VMs running in the data center is a vital metric that needs to be tackled by VMware. This is something that Citrix is already delivering with XenDesktop and I like what they are doing so far. You can see the latency measurement between the connection and also information like client version, IP addresses and broker that it connected through. All very helpful information for troubleshooting performance and connection issues.

I like the fact that VMware has added counters for Windows that can be monitored using Perfmon inside the OS, and you can always fire this up to look at something. But I think this needs to continue to develop further to make these connection and performance issues easy to continually monitor and troubleshoot. In the preview videos that VMware posted on this blog post are mostly centered around monitoring the infrastructure, this is what vCOPs already does. The last video did show some tasty nugguets about PCoIP monitoring which looks promising. But some type of a client summary page would be very helpful so Admins do not have to drill down into 10 screens to get the picture unless they want that level of detail. It also needs to provide performance monitoring for client connections and end user experience. Below is a list of things that I think would be very helpful in a VMware View deployment to monitor.

• PCoIP connection latency
• VM login times
• Client version
• Connection server client is connected through
• Connection type (PCoIP vs. RDP)

Below is a sample of what Citrix is offering today with their XenDesktop product. From this session screen you can shadow session which I wish VMware would add into View Manager. Then there are details about latency, connection type, endpoint details, which items are enabled within the HDX/ICA protocol. Overall a pretty good looking and helpful console from Citrix.

The lower part of the same screen shows you some hypervisor and broker health status. There is a simple graph that shows you CPU, Memory and Network usage for the VM that you are looking at.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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By creating the Vkernel CMS package they will be releasing 3 updated existing products along with one new product in a single virtual appliance. This allows for a easier and faster deployment and greater integration between the products. That was not previously available. You would still license the 3 products separately at $299 each per socket. Which if you have a large environment could be costly. I was impressed by several of the new features and the flexibility the new reporting is able to provide.

Below you can see some of the new reporting and data mining features from Vkernel. These are important in Capacity Management. I liked the ability to report on changes made within a selected time frame and then the HA reporting function. Getting notified of a cluster that will have an HA issue if a host should fail would be nice, this could be caused by someone dropping in a monster virtual machine that messes up your vSphere slot sizes.

This slide covers the automation of right sizing VM’s or reclaiming over provisioned virtual machines. This would probably scare the crap out of any Virtual admin that I have ever worked with. But if you have a lab or development environment it could be very handy to have this run nightly or weekly and pull back resources that users have gotten too greedy with.

Below you can see a slide that shows some details about the Inventory app included in the CMS package from Vkernel. It seems to offer some flexibility for pulling details out of your Virtual Infrastructure. For example you could quickly pull a list of powered off virtual machines.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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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.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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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

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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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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