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I would like to virtualize before putting in another Rack server but I am reluctant in fear of losing the ability to monitor actual physical CPU and Network I/O. My apps are real-time and highly Network I/O intensive. I monitor and allocate CPUs according to statistics of the I/O traffic to each app. Traffic can and will change across apps on a daily basis due to news and other external events.

1) Can vSphere (Free) provide me with physical CPU usage numbers for each VM at time t?

2) If I have 2 NICs can I know the load on the NIC of each VM at time t?

3) Or should I trust vSphere to optimize and micro manage each VM?

sfanjoy
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1 Answers1

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  1. vSphere does provide performance monitors that can be enabled to monitor realtime. You could also get up to the second numbers by SSH to the host and running esxtop command.
  2. On a ESXi server, you have two types of NICs: the physical NICs (vmnics), and virtual NICs (vNICs). The vNICs are the NICs on the VM. You can use esxtop or the performance charts to track NIC utilization and stats. You could also monitor the VM's usage of it's NIC in great detail with VMware Tools installed.
  3. You can trust vSphere to micro manage, but as a vSphere Administrator, it is your responsibility to manage traffic shaping and resource tweaking. I'll say you'll probably get the best reporting from vSphere Operations Manager but I don't think they do the foundation edition anymore.
Jarrod L. J. Gibson
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  • Jarrod is correct. All these issues and more have been thoroughly vetted out in ESXi 6. Virtualizing is now not only best-practice, it is industry standard and you should never use a physical server unless there's a very specific niche case to do so. Also, the PowerEdge R610 *should* have a iDRAC card (at least the one I manage does). You can easily monitor the server's hardware in the iDRAC web-console, in addition to vSphere. – SamAndrew81 Dec 13 '16 at 21:03
  • Lastly, FYI be aware that with ESXi Free there are **NO VM-level backups**! You need at least an Essentials license for VM-aware backups. This can be a huge-dealbreaker for many people. – SamAndrew81 Dec 13 '16 at 21:04