Monitoring network capacity and performance matrix

Network performance is dependent on the application workload and network configuration. Dropped network packets indicate a bottleneck in the network. To determine whether packets are being dropped, use resxtop/esxtop or the VMware vSphere Client advanced performance charts to examine the droppedTx and droppedRx network counter values.

If packets are being dropped, adjust the virtual machine CPU shares. This is just intensifying the problem for other VMs. The root solution is to reduce the overall CPU load on the host. If you just adjust CPU shares up for this VM, you'd expect other VMs to start dropping packets or having higher CPU latency (%RDY). If packets are not being dropped, check the size of the network packets and the data received and transmitted rates. In general, the larger the network packets, the faster the network speed. When the packet size is large, fewer packets are transferred, which reduces the amount of CPU required to...