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If I look at esxtop in "disk adapter" view I can see CMDS/s.

How can I extract this information in a counter like way so I can graph it?

This doesn't need to be done in real time, I'd be happy to log the data on all hosts and then extract it later to analyse it.

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up vote 1 down vote accepted

You mean, apart from using the pretty graphs in vCenter?

The simplest option is to run the command

# esxtop -b > esxtop_whatever.csv

This will make esxtop run in "batch mode", outputting data into CSV format. (See also: http://www.jume.nl/esx4man/man1/esxtop.1.html)

You can then load this file into perfmon on Windows or use esxplot (http://labs.vmware.com/flings/esxplot) to view the data.

Another nice trick is to create a performance snapshot (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1967)

# vm-support -s -d <duration> -i <interval>

This will create a large file with a number of 'snapshots' of the system state. This can then be 'replayed' with the command

# esxtop -R . 

in the extracted TGZ file that was created in the previous step.

We use that one quite a bit for performance troubleshooting at VMware ;-)

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Perfect! thank you :) –  SimonJGreen Mar 17 '12 at 7:54
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Download the free version of VMTurbo, install it on your vCenter server, and allow it to analyze your VMWare environment.

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