Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

vscsi stats

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Via the Dutch VMUG site I landed on a new blog, well new… for me new. This blog is maintained by Toni Verbeiren and he created an excellent article about monitoring performance stats for the scsi controllers inside a VM:

A tool is available on ESX 3.5 that creates histograms by default (and complete traces if wanted) is VscsiStats. As an option, one provides the vSCSI handle ID and the VM World ID. In order to get some statistics at all, one first needs to start the monitoring:
./vscsiStats -s

After some time, the relevant statistics can be fetched by issuing a command like:
./vscsiStats -i 8260 -w 1438 -p ioLength

Read more at the source…

There also appears to be a pdf about the subject on the VMware website which contains good information on the subject.

EDIT: You can find the command here: /usr/lib/vmware/bin

Could someone reboot the VMTN forum?

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I can’t seem to post anything or reply:

System Error

* The specified thread was not found.

It seems someone is reading my blog, the forum is almost up and running again!

System Error

We’re sorry but a serious error has occurred in the system. If you are a system administrator please click “more details” below for more information about this error.

Cisco and VMware best practice

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A couple of weeks ago I received a cool PDF via email, this week it appeared online(source blog). Check it out:

The Source PDF:
VMware has collaborated with Cisco to produce a guide for deploying VMware Infrastucture 3 with Cisco switches. This guide covers the physical and virtual data network and storage network deployment considerations for ESX Server with suggested topologies and designs.

ESX memory usage

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Just noticed the following topic, which definitely contains some good info about how ESX deals with memory. Thanks to Kit for clearing things up. These posts are valuable, keep ’em coming!

a short outtake:

Basically how aggressive do you want TPS to scan for shared pages? Obviously TPS has a cost to running in terms of CPU, but has benefits in terms of reduced memory usage. So there’s a tradeoff. We have a default that we think is a good balance, but we let the user modify that if they want.