E-Guide

Expert tips for monitoring your

VMware environment
Traditional system performance monitoring tools cant access the
underlying virtualization layer and therefore provide unreliable results
in virtual environments. Fortunately, VMware vSphere has several
built-in tools to monitor and troubleshoot host and VM performance. In
this e-guide from SearchVMware.com, gain expert insight into the
existing performance monitoring tools in vSphere for optimal virtual
environment management. And discover five VMware administration
and management tips that will help you better manage your VMs and
avoid common mistakes.

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SearchVMware.com E-Guide
Expert tips for monitoring your VMware environment

E-Guide

Expert tips for monitoring your

VMware environment
Table of Contents
VMware vSphere's built-in performance monitoring tools
VMware administration and management: Five quick tips
Resources from Nimsoft, Inc.

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VMware vSphere's built-in performance monitoring

tools
By Eric Siebert, Contributor, SearchVMware.com
Monitoring the performance of your VMware vSphere hosts and virtual machines (VMs) is
critical for several reasons: many VMs compete for host resources, resource bottlenecks are
not always obvious, and a single bottleneck can greatly affect performance in a negative
way. Without the right monitoring, reporting and alerting tools in place, busy administrators
can overlook these issues. In this tip, we outline the free performance monitoring tools
available in vSphere to help monitor an environment and take appropriate action.
Traditional system performance monitoring tools cannot access the underlying virtualization
layer and often provide unreliable results for a virtualized environment. Fortunately,
VMware vSphere has several built-in tools to monitor and troubleshoot host and VM
performance.
To effectively monitor your virtualized environment from every angle, you should monitor
the VM itself, the host, the networking traffic and the storage traffic. This approach also
provides true insight into the performance health of your virtual environment.
Using the Perfmon performance monitoring tool
Let's begin with how to monitor virtual machines. If your VMs run Windows, the built-in
Perfmon utility can monitor performance. Prior to the release of vSphere, it was not
recommended to use Perfmon on VMs. In prior versions of VMware, Perfmon was unaware
of the activity at the virtualization layer, particularly concerning CPU and memory use. But
now, vSphere has added counters specifically for Perfmon that track CPU and memory use
and provide more accurate measurement. This change enables you to use traditional
Windows Management Instrumentation monitoring tools to get more accurate information.
These new counters are included in the VMware Tools package and are labeled "VM
Memory" and "VM Processor."

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While the new VM counters provide more information about performance inside a VM, it is
best to monitor performance outside a VM as well. To monitor performance outside a VM,
use the vSphere Client, which has a Performance tab for every object that you can select in
vCenter Server (see below). Objects may be data centers, clusters, hosts or VMs. Selecting
a different object displays different types of data. Selecting hosts or VMs provides the most
detailed performance data, such as information on CPU, memory, disk and network
statistics.
When you select the Performance tab, you have two views available: Overview and
Advanced. The Overview option presents a dashboard of key statistics, and the Advanced
view provides more detailed information. Clicking on Chart Options offers additional
counters that may not show by default.

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The Statistics Level setting, which is configured in vCenter Server's settings, controls the
number of counters for each category. In the vCenter Statistics setting, the default is level
1, which is the lowest level and provides only basic performance information on each
resource. The setting can be increased up to level 4, which provides the maximum
information possible.
Choosing level 4 reporting, however, can slow the performance of vCenter Server and
drastically increase the size of its database. Here's why: VCenter Server stores historical
performance data in its database and rolls up data from one time interval (i.e., a fiveminute interval) to the next (i.e., a 30-minute interval). A rollup then takes the average of
several readings for the first time interval to generate the second interval's value. So,
vCenter, for example, might sample performance every five minutes and store these values.
After 30 minutes, vCenter averages the previous six five-minute intervals and rolls them up
to calculate the 30-minute one.
As you might now conclude, recording detailed performance metrics for multiple hosts and
VMs can cause the database to become quite large. So unless you have to troubleshoot a
performance problem and need more detailed information, I recommend leaving the
Statistics Level at level 1; the default level provides plenty of useful information for
everyday use.

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Also note that while vCenter Server provides configurable performance statistic collections - you can view both real-time and historical statistics as far in the past as you desire -historical data is severely limited for ESX and ESXi hosts that are not managed by vCenter
Server, (60 minutes for ESXi and 24 hours for ESX).
The esxtop and resxtop performance monitoring tools
Another key performance monitoring tool is the ESX service console utility esxtop. Its
remote version is called resxtop and is included with the vSphere command-line interface
and the VMware Management Assistant (vMA). While esxtop can be used only on ESX hosts,
resxtop can run remotely and connect to ESX and ESXi hosts.
Esxtop is a text-based utility that generates real-time advanced performance statistics for
all host resources. If you aren't familiar with esxtop's terminology, output and navigation,
however, you may encounter a learning curve. Esxtop navigation requires the use of singlekey commands that are not displayed on the screen. Still, you can access a list of available
commands by pressing the H or question-mark (?) keys.

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The default esxtop display shows CPU statistics. You can add fields by pressing the F key, or
switch to other resource views by pressing C (for CPU), N (for network), M (for memory), D
(for disk adapter), V (for disk VM), U (for disk device), or I (for interrupt).
When using esxtop, here's a tip: Expand your screen horizontally. Many fields that display
across the screen are hidden until you expand your screen's view.

Esxtop can be run in three modes: interactive, batch and replay. Interactive mode is the
default mode and allows you to view and change the data that is displayed on the screen.
Batch mode allows you to collect and save data over time to a file, which can then be
imported to Microsoft Excel or Windows Perfmon for review. Replay mode allows you to
replay a statistics collection period that can be recorded with the vm-support command. The
vm-support command allows you to specify a duration and interval to collect statistics which
can then be saved to a file.
Esxtop isn't an all-purpose tool, but when it comes to troubleshooting performance
problems, it's invaluable. It displays several advanced statistics that are not shown in the
vSphere Client.

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vCenter Server performance alarms

While periodic monitoring performance with the vSphere Client or esxtop is beneficial in
several ways, neither the vSphere client nor esxtop alerts you to problems in your
environment as they happen. Fortunately, you can use vCenter Server alarms. These alarms
alert you when specific resource conditions exist. VMware Infrastructure 3 offered few and
unhelpful -- performance alarms. VMware vSphere offers many more than its predecessor,
and these alarms are also more useful because of the new Condition Length field that was
added to the alarm trigger (see image below).

The Condition Length field can eliminate false alarms by allowing you to specify the length
of time for which a condition must persist before an alert is triggered. When setting an
alarm for VM CPU usage (see image below), for example, it may not be a problem if a single
VM is at 100% CPU use for a few seconds. If this condition were to persist for more than
five minutes, however, it could indicate a problem. Condition Length allows you to receive
an alert after that five minutes has elapsed.

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There are many helpful alarms available for host and VM resource usage. I recommend
taking advantage of them so that you can quickly resolve issues that affect performance in
your environment.

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Expert tips for monitoring your VMware environment

VMware administration and management: Five

quick tips
By Eric Siebert, Contributor, SearchVmare.com
VMware administration and management can be complicated and frustrating. But it's much
easier when you know the optimal way to handle virtual machines (VMs).
VMware administration and management requires not only technical expertise but also
problem-solving skills. And if you don't properly manage a VMware environment, it can
quickly come back to bite you. These VMware administration and management tips will help
you better manage your VMs and avoid common mistakes.
VMware administration tip No. 1: Thin is in
You should strive to properly size virtual disks, but sometimes disk size grows, such as with
a database server that accumulates additional data on a regular basis.
In these situations, administrators often allocate more disk space to a VM than is initially
needed. Thin provisioning helps reduce this wasted space.
Thin-provisioned disks do not allocate the full virtual disk size when created. Instead, they
grow as disk blocks are written inside the guest operating systems.
Thin provisioning can be done at both the virtualization and storage-array levels, so which
method should you choose? The answer is both. You get better space efficiency, and they
operate independently, so they will not conflict with each other. You can also use Storage
vMotion to re-shrink disks at the virtualization level when needed.
VMware administration tip No. 2: Install and update VMware Tools
Sure, VMs can run without VMware Tools installed inside the guest OS, but they won't run
as efficiently. Aside from its management tools, VMware Tools also contains virtual

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hardware drivers that are better optimized and more efficient than the default drivers in the
OS.
Additionally, VMware Tools enables communication between a hypervisor and the guest OS,
which helps optimize a guest OS to run on a virtual host. After you upgrade a host, keep
VMware Tools up to date. New versions may include new drivers and security enhancements
that are critical for optimum performance.
VMware administration tip No. 3: Monitor and limit VM snapshots
You should not rely on VM snapshots as a primary backup method. Snapshots are best for
ad hoc backups when performing OS and application maintenance and upgrades.
When snapshots are running, they have some resource overhead, which can limit feature
capabilities. They also create the potential for problems as your single virtual disk is split
into two or more virtual disk files.
It's best to delete snapshots as soon as you don't need them, because it's easy to forget
that snapshots are running, and you may not discover them until months later. At that
point, snapshots will have grown extremely large, and deleting them takes a long time,
which can cause poor VM performance.
Additionally, snapshots can eat up a lot of disk space on data stores. Therefore, you should
run periodic reports and use reporting and management tools and alarms to keep track of
this disk usage. The new Storage View in vCenter Server also has a snapshot size column,
which makes it easy to monitor snapshot usage.
VMware administration tip No. 4: Use templates and clones
The ability to create templates and clone VMs are big benefits of virtualization. Both actions
can make new VM deployments simple and easy.
Templates are standard VM images you can use to create new VMs with just a few clicks of
the mouse. Cloning, on the other hand, makes an identical copy of an existing VM, which is
useful for creating new VMs and troubleshooting.

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Both methods require vCenter Server, but there are other ways to duplicate this
functionality, including vCenter Converter, command-line tools and the vSphere Client.
VMware administration tip No.5: Deal with rogue VMs
Sometimes VMs go into a "zombie state" and can't be powered off. On a physical server,
you can yank the power cord to reset a hung server. But VMs don't have power cords, so
that's not an option. If you reboot the host to reset a VM, you'll disrupt the other VMs on
the host.
Fortunately there are some brute-force methods that you can use from the host's
management console to reset a VM without powering off the host. But these methods differ
for ESX- and ESXi-based hosts.

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Resources from Nimsoft, Inc

Best Practices for Monitoring VMware

Virtual Certainty: Best Practices for Gaining Monitoring Clarity in VMware
Environments

About Nimsoft, Inc

Nimsoft provides next generation performance and availability monitoring solutions for the
complete physical and virtualized IT infrastructure. The Nimsoft solutions redefine the
standards for ease of use and speed of deployment -providing outstanding return on
investment and unparalleled customer satisfaction. Over 680 customers in 30 countries rely
on Nimsoft solutions to monitor their IT based business applications and services. These
customers include mid-market and global organizations, such as Barclays Capital and
Amway Corporation, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ladbrokes, MTU Aero Engines, TriNet, TRW
Automotive, and hundreds of leading managed service providers such as CDW Berbee,
Easynet and Rackspace Managed Hosting.

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