Tag Archives: resxtop

VCAP-DCA Study notes 6.2 – Troubleshoot CPU and Memory Performance

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Knowledge

  • Identify resxtop/esxtop metrics related to memory and CPU
  • Identify vCenter Server Performance Chart metrics related to memory and CPU

Skills and Abilities

  • Troubleshoot ESX/ESXi Host and Virtual Machine CPU performance issues using appropriate metrics
  • Troubleshoot ESX/ESXi Host and Virtual Machine memory performance issues using appropriate metrics
  • Use Hot?Add functionality to resolve identified Virtual Machine CPU and memory performance issues

Tools & learning resources

This is another objective that’s hard to quantify – experience will be the main requirement! There are some great general purpose resources out there;

Note that resxtop (built in to the vMA) does not offer the ‘replay’ mode available in ESX classic. Source: VMworld session MA6580, vMA Tips and Tricks. Continue reading VCAP-DCA Study notes 6.2 – Troubleshoot CPU and Memory Performance →

VCAP-DCA Study notes – 3.5 Utilize Advanced vSphere Performance Monitoring Tools

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This is one objective where you definitely have to get hands on – there’s no way you’ll learn esxtop otherwise. Ideally you’ll have a real infrastructure to play with as you want hosts with memory contention, ballooning, swapping, NUMA optimisations etc so you can play with and understand the features.

Knowledge

  • Identify hot keys and fields used with resxtop/esxtop
  • Identify fields used with vscsiStats

Skills and Abilities

  • Configure esxtop/resxtop custom profiles
  • Determine use cases for and apply esxtop/resxtop Interactive, Batch and Replay modes
  • Use vscsiStats to gather storage performance data
  • Use esxtop/resxtop to collect performance data
  • Given esxtop/resxtop output, identify relative performance data for capacity planning purposes

Tools & learning resources

Using resxtop

Two ways of invoking;

  • resxtop –server <esxi host>
  • resxtop –server <vCenter server> –vihost <esxi host>

Continue reading VCAP-DCA Study notes – 3.5 Utilize Advanced vSphere Performance Monitoring Tools →