Chapter 19 - An Introduction to ESX Native Tools and How to Use Them

Abstract

This chapter is reviews the tools that come native to all ESX servers. These native tools are powerful and one can create many different scripts calling these commands. Esxtop is a very simple yet powerful tool which can be used for diagnosing performance issues of the ESX host as well as the virtual machines. VMware has expanded Esxtop to provide metrics specific to virtualization. Esxtop provides real-time monitoring of virtual machine processes. VMware has identified three types of worlds, or virtual machine processes, which exist in ESX Server. These are Virtual Machine, System, and Service Console. A virtual machine world is the process under which a specific virtual machine's virtual processor is run. The virtual machine world is denoted by vmm. System worlds are created to run a number of system services. Idle worlds are created for each processor on one's ESX host. vmkfstools is a powerful command-line tool that comes native to ESX Server. The tool can create and manipulate VMDK files, performing such tasks as importing and exporting disk files, growing and shrinking existing disk files, and committing REDO files. The tool can also create VMFS partitions and has a host of other capabilities. Although not a command-line tool, vmkusage is a great tool for troubleshooting. One can also use vmkusage, which provides the utilization of the ESX Server as well as all running virtual machines.