In this blog post I will talk about some of the advance storage and host performance charts that we can create in vSphere web client to review performance statistics of vSphere environment.
I will start with the basic storage and performance graph available in vSphere Web Client and later we will look into some advance options which help us in understanding the current performance statistics of vSphere environment.
Storage overview charts:
(i) Log in to vSphere web client with the SSO administrator credential
(ii) In the left pane, click the Storage icon.
(iii)Expand the Storage inventory tree and select the Shared datastore you want to analyze.
(iv) In the middle pane, click the Monitor tab and click the Performance tab
(v) Above the charts, verify that Space is selected from the View drop-down menu.
(vi)Review the overview charts to find the performance values.
(vii) Space that is used by virtual disks, in the By File Type chart
(viii) Total space that is used by the top objects, in the By Virtual Machines (Top 5) chart
ESXi Host overview charts:
(i) In the left pane, click the Hosts and Clusters icon.
(ii) In the Hosts and Clusters inventory tree, select the host you want to analyze, in my case it is esxi01.vclass.local.
(iii) In the center pane, click the Monitor tab and click the Performance tab.
(iv) Above the charts, verify that Home is selected from the View drop-down menu.
(v) The time of any significant CPU spike, in the CPU (%) chart
(vi) The time of any significant latency spike, in the Disk (ms) chart
Now I will show how to configure advance custom charts in vSphere Web Client:
(i) In the chart links panel, click the Advanced link.
(ii) Collapse the links panel by clicking the << icon.
(iii) The viewable chart area can be increased by collapsing the chart links panel.
(iv) Above the chart graphic, select Memory from the View drop-down menu.
(v) The View drop-down menu appears above the top-right corner of the graphical chart, to the right of the chart title.
(vi) To the left of the View drop-down menu, click the Chart Options link and customize the chart options.
(vii) In the Chart Metrics panel on the left side of the window, verify that only Memory is selected.
(viii) Select Real-time from the Timespan drop-down menu.
(ix) Select Stacked Graph per VM from the Chart Type drop-down menu.
(x) In the Select object for this chart panel, click all to select all the listed objects.
(xi) In the Select counters for this chart panel, click none to deselect all counters and select the Usage check box.
(xii) Click OK to close the Chart Options window.
The customized chart displays the memory usage counter for all virtual machines that are in a running state, as well as for the ESXi host.
(i) Examine the performance chart legend.
(ii)Scroll down to uncover the performance chart legend.
(iii)The Average column is the last column in the table and might not appear until more space is made available by resizing columns.
(iv)Point to the average column values to determine the average memory usage for esxi01.vclass.local and the Linux01 virtual machine.
(v)Export an advanced chart as a graphic image.
(vi)Scroll to the top of the chart pane.
(vii)Click the Export icon and select To PNG.
The exported image looks like below:
Like this we can create custom advance charts for CPU and storage parameters as well.
I am planning to write a blog post on resxtop commands in future which can be used to capture performance data via command line.
i hope you liked the post , any feedback’s from the readers regarding the content are welcomed. keep learning and sharing.
Saurav Issar 