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VMware vSphere Troubleshooting
VMware vSphere Troubleshooting

VMware vSphere Troubleshooting: Gain expertise in troubleshooting most common issues to implement vSphere environments with ease

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VMware vSphere Troubleshooting

Chapter 2. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Host and VM Performance

In the previous chapter, you learned some basic troubleshooting skills and performed some vSphere troubleshooting. This chapter extends those skills deeper by using different monitoring tools to observe vSphere performance and identifies any potential problems that can cause bottlenecks in your infrastructure.

The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Tools for performance monitoring
  • Analyzing the esxtop results
  • Understanding key performance metrics (CPU, memory, network, storage)
  • Using vMA and remote esxtop
  • Analyzing vCenter performance charts
  • Creating charts
  • Configuring metrics
  • Configuring logging level for performance
  • USB attached virtual machines
  • Fault-tolerant virtual machines

The previous chapter thoroughly covered how to collect diagnostic information and different logs from vSphere hosts. Sometimes, the diagnostic information you have collected is not enough to identify the root cause of the problems vSphere...

Tools for performance monitoring

As already mentioned, VMware provides many power tools to monitor the performance of your vSphere infrastructure. These power tools help you to diagnose different problems of your vSphere hosts and vCenter Server in order to resolve them. Let's take a look at some of the tools.

Using esxtop/resxtop

The main tool for performance monitoring is esxtop, which collects data based on different metrics, for example, host memory usage, network usage, disk usage/IOPs and CPU usage.

Esxtop is just like using top in Linux. It has the same look and feel and provides the same kind of information provided by top tools in Linux. Esxtop is a famous tool almost every seasoned system administrator knows about. It can be used in real-time performance monitoring of vSphere hosts, and metrics can be monitored for system interruptions, CPU, network, disk device, disk adapter, and memory, each on a dedicated screen. The real-time monitoring can help you to identify different...

Analyzing esxtop results

The data collected by esxtop is processed as rates. When you run the esxtop command without any parameters, it presents the server-wide and individual statistics of a VM, the resource pool, the CPU utilization, and a world. A world is a technical term, like a running process in VMware terms, that represents a single VMkernel schedulable entity or a process or processes running on VMkernel. As we have a total of 369 worlds (see Figure 2.1), it is called group of worlds. These worlds can belong to a group of idle worlds, group of system worlds, group of helper worlds, or another group of worlds.

Understanding CPU statistics

I will explain the statistics found in Figure 2.1. The first line you can find in esxtop or vtop starts with the current system time. The uptime indicates how long the host is up. As you can see in the preceding figures, our host is up since the last 431 days. The next is the number of worlds, which in our case is 369.

The next option indicates the...

Memory statistics

VMware vSphere hosts are designed to utilize memory efficiently like other resources. The resource management policies are implemented in the vSphere host to allocate memory to the virtual machines it is hosting. This allocation is based on the allocated memory setting of a virtual machine and the current system load. The vSphere host reveals different memory statistics that can be viewed using esxtop. Before we start looking into memory statistics, let's look at a brief introduction of how a vSphere host manages its memory.

Memory statistics

Figure 2.6

Memory management in a vSphere host

Before we take a look at vSphere host memory metrics, I will walk you through memory management in a vSphere host system briefly. The memory management concept in a vSphere host will help you to understand the metrics displayed by esxtop. A vSphere host reclaims memory to provision memory overcommitment.

Memory overcommitment

The vSphere host system reserves physical memory for guaranteed delivery of memory...

Network metrics

The third common type of metrics that can be obtained from esxtop is network metrics. These metrics can help you troubleshoot network usage for your vSphere host and the virtual machines:

  1. Connect to a vSphere host using SSH and log in as root or an administrative user.
  2. In the command prompt, type esxtop without any flags.
  3. Press n to view the network screen. This screen displays detailed information about network usage.
  4. You need to enable some additional information for the physical network properties of vSphere hosts in esxtop for the UP (uplink), FULLDUPLEX, SPEED, TEAM-PNIC fields. Press c to enable the aforementioned fields; you can press c again to remove any field.
  5. Press f to go into the Current Field Order screen.
  6. Press the Esc key to return to the esxtop network statistics screen.

Understanding network metrics

In esxtop, network statistics are displayed for each port of a virtual switch. These ports are then either linked as uplinks to a physical network adapter or they are...

Storage metrics

Before we start exploring disk performance metrics, I will walk you through three different screens for the disk metrics. The first storage metrics screen is called disk device view, where you can view LUN information; the second one is the disk VM screen where you can see the statistics per virtual machine basis; and the last one is the disk adapter screen where you can view the information of disk statistics per host bus adapter (HBA) basis.

Let's access esxtop to view the disk statistics in the LUN mode:

  1. Connect to a vSphere host using SSH and log in as root or an administrative user.
  2. In the command prompt, type esxtop without any flags.
  3. Press u to switch disk device screen. This screen displays detailed information about storage, including your LUN, available data stores, shares, and number of objects.
  4. Press f to go into Current Field Order screen.
  5. You need to enable some additional information for the Number of Objects and Shares fields. Press c and then press d to enable...

Tools for performance monitoring


As already mentioned, VMware provides many power tools to monitor the performance of your vSphere infrastructure. These power tools help you to diagnose different problems of your vSphere hosts and vCenter Server in order to resolve them. Let's take a look at some of the tools.

Using esxtop/resxtop

The main tool for performance monitoring is esxtop, which collects data based on different metrics, for example, host memory usage, network usage, disk usage/IOPs and CPU usage.

Esxtop is just like using top in Linux. It has the same look and feel and provides the same kind of information provided by top tools in Linux. Esxtop is a famous tool almost every seasoned system administrator knows about. It can be used in real-time performance monitoring of vSphere hosts, and metrics can be monitored for system interruptions, CPU, network, disk device, disk adapter, and memory, each on a dedicated screen. The real-time monitoring can help you to identify different problems...

Analyzing esxtop results


The data collected by esxtop is processed as rates. When you run the esxtop command without any parameters, it presents the server-wide and individual statistics of a VM, the resource pool, the CPU utilization, and a world. A world is a technical term, like a running process in VMware terms, that represents a single VMkernel schedulable entity or a process or processes running on VMkernel. As we have a total of 369 worlds (see Figure 2.1), it is called group of worlds. These worlds can belong to a group of idle worlds, group of system worlds, group of helper worlds, or another group of worlds.

Understanding CPU statistics

I will explain the statistics found in Figure 2.1. The first line you can find in esxtop or vtop starts with the current system time. The uptime indicates how long the host is up. As you can see in the preceding figures, our host is up since the last 431 days. The next is the number of worlds, which in our case is 369.

The next option indicates the...

Memory statistics


VMware vSphere hosts are designed to utilize memory efficiently like other resources. The resource management policies are implemented in the vSphere host to allocate memory to the virtual machines it is hosting. This allocation is based on the allocated memory setting of a virtual machine and the current system load. The vSphere host reveals different memory statistics that can be viewed using esxtop. Before we start looking into memory statistics, let's look at a brief introduction of how a vSphere host manages its memory.

Figure 2.6

Memory management in a vSphere host

Before we take a look at vSphere host memory metrics, I will walk you through memory management in a vSphere host system briefly. The memory management concept in a vSphere host will help you to understand the metrics displayed by esxtop. A vSphere host reclaims memory to provision memory overcommitment.

Memory overcommitment

The vSphere host system reserves physical memory for guaranteed delivery of memory...

Network metrics


The third common type of metrics that can be obtained from esxtop is network metrics. These metrics can help you troubleshoot network usage for your vSphere host and the virtual machines:

  1. Connect to a vSphere host using SSH and log in as root or an administrative user.

  2. In the command prompt, type esxtop without any flags.

  3. Press n to view the network screen. This screen displays detailed information about network usage.

  4. You need to enable some additional information for the physical network properties of vSphere hosts in esxtop for the UP (uplink), FULLDUPLEX, SPEED, TEAM-PNIC fields. Press c to enable the aforementioned fields; you can press c again to remove any field.

  5. Press f to go into the Current Field Order screen.

  6. Press the Esc key to return to the esxtop network statistics screen.

Understanding network metrics

In esxtop, network statistics are displayed for each port of a virtual switch. These ports are then either linked as uplinks to a physical network adapter or they are...

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Key benefits

  • Plan, analyze, and design effective solutions for your vSphere environment
  • Troubleshoot problems related to vSphere performance
  • Familiarize yourself with the advanced troubleshooting conceptsand become an xpert level administrator

Description

VMware vSphere is the leading server virtualization platform with consistent management for virtual data centers. It enhances troubleshooting skills to diagnose and resolve day to day problems in your VMware vSphere infrastructure environment. This book will provide you practical hands-on knowledge of using different performance monitoring and troubleshooting tools to manage and troubleshoot the vSphere infrastructure. It begins by introducing systematic approach for troubleshooting different problems and show casing the troubleshooting techniques. You will be able to use the troubleshooting tools to monitor performance, and troubleshoot issues related to Hosts and Virtual Machines. Moving on, you will troubleshoot High Availability, storage I/O control problems, virtual LANS, and iSCSI, NFS, VMFS issues. By the end of this book, you will be able to analyze and solve advanced issues related to vShpere environment such as vcenter certificates, database problems, and different failed state errors.

Who is this book for?

The books is intended for mid-level System Engineers and System Integrators who want to learn VMware power tools to troubleshoot and manage the vSphere infrastructure. Good knowledge level and understanding of virtualization is expected.

What you will learn

  • Configure vSphere management assistant and troubleshooting tools
  • Use troubleshooting tools to monitor performance and troubleshoot different issues
  • Learn how to troubleshoot High Availability and other commonly known problems with clusters such as insufficient resources, failing heartbeats
  • Use Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) to verify configuration
  • Diagnose storage issues including iSCSI, NFS and VMFS problems
  • Manage vSphere Network Virtual and Distributed Switches, Trunks, VLANS
  • Monitor and shape network traffic, configure routes and DNS
  • Quickly resolve common day-to-day problems by analysing logs of VMware vSphere hosts and VMware vCenter Server
  • Debug and resolve commonly known vSphere Cluster problems

Product Details

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Publication date : Nov 02, 2015
Length: 270 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782175070
Vendor :
VMware
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Product Details

Publication date : Nov 02, 2015
Length: 270 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782175070
Vendor :
VMware
Tools :

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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
1. The Methodology of Problem Solving Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Host and VM Performance Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Troubleshooting Clusters Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Networking Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Storage Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Advanced Troubleshooting of vCenter Server and vSphere Hosts Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A. Learning PowerGUI Basics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
B. Installing VMware vRealize Operations Manager Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
C. Power CLI - A Basic Reference Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Must read book for VMware admins
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