Monday, March 10, 2008

VMware VscsiStats: Measuring at the virtual SCSI level

I mentioned earlier that one of the presentations at VMworld Europe 2008 was about measuring at the level of the virtual SCSI adapter of a VM. A wealth of information is available when looking at this kind of information.

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

This, for instance, yields an histogram of the size of IO pacakges sent to the virtual SCSI adapter (and thus to the storage array). To finalize the monitoring, it has to be stopped as well:

./vscsiStats -x


The result of the command above, in my test, was a graph like the one below:


This is a VM running Windows 2003. Remember this is a histogram, we put the measures points in 'buckets' according to their size and plot their relative frequency.

Remark that there is some IO with sizes 4095 bytes 8191 bytes. This is a sign that the file systems are not aligned properly. The fact that 4K sizes are the majority is nice, because VMFS is optimized for IO of 4KB.

6 comments:

Vikash Kumar Roy said...

Where you run this command from "./vscsiStats -s". I dont see this on my 3.5 host

Toni said...

Hi,

Thanks for you message.

I don't remember exactly where it is located, it sure isn't in the default $PATH.

Try the following command:
'find /usr -name vscsiStats'

You will find some other utilities in this same directory as well. Good luck and let me know!

Anonymous said...

vscsistats can be found in /usr/lib/vmware/bin

Duncan Epping (VMware) said...

Cool info, thanks!

Jon Hall said...

Did you use a macro to generate the graph? I've been looking for one...

Toni said...

@Jon:

I just imported the data into Excel and did the formatting by hand.

There are some Open Source tools that enable you to generate graphs from the command line as well.

Custom Search