TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter is going to review the tools that come native to all ESX servers. It is important that, one, you understand these tools exist, and, two, you know how to use them from the command line and how you can incorporate them into scripts. VMware provides some very powerful tools that are built on native Linux functionality and that are expanded for use within the ESX host and the virtual machines residing on them.
Esxtop is a very simple yet powerful tool that can be used for diagnosing performance issues of the ESX host as well as the virtual machines. In Linux, there exists a comparable command-line tool, called Top, which can be used similarly for Linux OSes to gather performance metrics. VMware has expanded Esxtop to provide metrics specific to virtualization. Esxtop provides real-time monitoring of virtual machine processes (also known as worlds). Worlds are simply virtual machine processes run by the VMkernel. VMware has identified three types of worlds, or virtual machine processes, which exist in ESX Server. These are
Virtual Machine
System
Service Console
But before delving too deep into specific processes or the worlds that Esxtop monitors, let s take a quick look at Esxtop when you run it.
Esxtop comes installed natively when you install ESX Server, so there is nothing you need to load. To run Esxtop, you need to access the service console of your ESX host. Once at the service console, type [root@esx01 root]#
