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I am looking for some tool or way to retrieve performance data from guest VMs running under vSphere 4.1. I am currently interested in the 4 basic metrics: CPU(%), Memory(%), Disk availability(%) & Network utilisation(Kb/s).

The issue I have is that all of vSphere's performance data is from a ESXi host perspective (active, shared, consumed, overhead, swapped etc.) which is far removed from the data from the VM's own perspective.

For instance, I have a Windows server VM idling, using around 410MB (~25% of its allocated 2GB) as reported by Task Manager, and this is the value I'm after. vSphere's metrics seem unable to arrive at this figure by any reliable and repeatable means.

Is anyone aware of tools that can obtain this kind of data? The simpler, the better.


Edit 2011/03/16: Failing anything else, can even a close approximate of the VM's usage be obtained from the available data? For instance, consumed - (shared - zero) gives a moderately accurate figure, but only in some cases. In others it can be way out.

2 Answers 2

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You don't mention if you are looking for a free or paid application to monitor this. I would love to make a suggestion for a free solution, but I don't have any experience with one.

If you don't mind paying for a solution then you may want to try out vFoglight

I currently use vFoglight to monitor ~70 virtual machines, 6 physical hosts, and 2 datastores. The software also has alarms that you can setup around hosts and guest resources and alert on critical situations, much like the green/yellow/red alerting of vCenter. There are many alarms set out of the box but I find that it needs quite a bit of customization to make the alarms very useful. However, as a piece of software to visually watch VM performance, it's great.

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  • So this definitely can give you CPU/RAM/etc. figures that are the same as (or as close as possible to) what you would get from the guest OS's own tools:eg, top on Unix/Linux, taskmgr on Windows? Mar 16, 2011 at 3:10
  • Yeah. The vFoglight site has some great screen shots of guest OS monitoring in action. CPU/RAM/Disk/Network IO, all there.
    – Chadddada
    Mar 16, 2011 at 13:33
  • The only screenshot I saw of a VM's memory usage contained the vSphere metrics: swapped, shared, ballooned, active, etc. which is not what I'm after. Mar 17, 2011 at 8:52
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We use SNMP to get what the guest OS is reporting. Any Network Monitoring System that does SNMP will give you this info.

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  • We sadly don't have the SNMP option, for various reasons. Mar 16, 2011 at 4:39

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