VMware ESXTOP Commands for Storage Monitoring

VMware ESXTOP Commands for Storage Monitoring

Let me just say that lately I’ve been spending way too much time learning about storage. The differences between 3PAR, HP, EMC, Lefthand and NetApp. How to configure, how to carve it, aggregates, LUN, spindle, IOPS, volumes, RAID groups, disk group, parity groups, queue depth, dedupe, replication, snapshot, and so on.

I thought I’d post some useful CLI ESXTOP commands to help with monitoring storage for when you start having performance problems resulting from over subscribed storage.

1. Monitor overall storage performance per HBA:

esxtop

d

f

b,c,d,e,h,j

s,2

2. Monitor storage performance per LUN: *

esxtop

u

f

b,c,f,h

s,2

3. Monitor storage performance per VM: *

esxtop

v

f

b,d,e,h,j

s,2

* These options are only available in ESX 3.5 and greater.

The columns we are going to pay attention to are CMDS/s, DAVG/cmd, KAVG/cmd and GAVG/cmd. Below is a brief description of each of these
values.

CMDS/s:

This is the number of IOPS or Input/Output Operations Per Second being sent to or coming from the device or VM being monitored.

DAVG/cmd:

This is the average response time in milliseconds per command being sent to the device.

KAVG/cmd:

This is the amount of time the command spends in the VMkernel.

GAVG/cmd:

This is the response time as it is perceived by the guest OS.

VMinstall.com

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