Monitoring VMware vSphere Performance - Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5 - page 706

8. Selecting an object or objects—in this case a controller—and a counter or counters lets
you monitor for activity that is interesting or necessary to meet service levels. Select the
objects that represent the ESXi host and one of the disk controllers.
9. In the counters list, select Disk Read Rate, Disk Write Rate, and Disk Usage (Average/
Rate) to get an overall view of the activity for the selected controller.
10. Click OK to return to the Performance tab.
This performance chart will give you an idea of the activity on the selected disk controller.
But what if you want to see disk activity for the entire host by each VM? In this case, a Stacked
Graph view can show you what you need.
Stacked Views
A stacked view is helpful in identifying whether one particular VM is monopolizing a volume.
Whichever VM has the tallest stack in the comparison may be degrading the performance of other
VMs' virtual disks.
Now let's switch to the virtual machine view. Looking at individual VMs for insight into
their disk utilization can lead to some useful conclusions. File and print VMs, or any server that
provides print queues or database services, will generate some disk-related I/O that needs to be
monitored. In some cases, if the VM is generating too much I/O, it may degrade the performance
of other VMs running out of the same volume. Let's take a look at a VM's chart.
Perform the following steps to create a VM chart showing real-time disk controller
utilization:
1. Launch the vSphere Web Client if it is not already running, and connect to a vCenter
Server instance.
2. Navigate to either the Hosts And Clusters view or the VMs And Templates view.
3. In the Navigator, click a virtual machine.
This shows you the Summary tab in the Details section on the right.
4. Select the Performance tab, and switch to Advanced view.
5. Click the Chart Options link to open the Chart Options dialog box.
6. Under Chart Options, select the Virtual Disk resource type and the Real-Time display
interval.
7. Set the chart type to Line Graph.
8. Set both objects listed in the list of objects.
9. In the list of counters, select Read Rate, Write Rate (Average/Rate).
10. Click OK to apply these changes and return to the Performance tab.
With this chart, you should have an informative picture of this VM's disk I/O behavior. This
VM is busy generating reads and writes for its application. Does the chart show enough I/O to