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How to capture an esxtop output

There are a couple of very important things to keep in mind when capturing an esxtop:

• The esxtop should be captured from the ESXi host where you suspect possible performance issues are originating from. It is host specific and does not capture for a cluster.
• If there are particular VMs you suspect as the cause of performance anomalies, the esxtop needs to be captured on the ESXi host where the VM resides at the time the esxtop is run.
• When specifying the location of the esxtop.csv file, please be sure you send it to a datastore that has at least 5GB of space available. If you try to send the file to the tmp folder, you risk filling it up and causing the ESXi Host management services to stall. This would require a host reboot and possible outage, so please be mindful of this.
• SSH must be enabled on the ESXi host since esxtop can only be ran / captured from the ESXi host CLI.
• The output file should always be a .csv format for easy review of the data.

esxtop -b -a -d 2 -n 300 > /vmfs/volumes/pure_datastore/esxtop-[hostname]-[date].csv

[root@ac-esxi-6:~] mkdir /vmfs/volumes/sn1-x70-b05-vmfs-scale-ds/esxtop-captures/
[root@ac-esxi-6:~]
[root@ac-esxi-6:~] esxtop -b -a -d 2 -n 300 > /vmfs/volumes/sn1-x70-b05-vmfs-scale-ds/esxtop-captures/esxtop-ac-esxi-6-June-2019.csv
[root@ac-esxi-6:~]
[root@ac-esxi-6:~] ls -lh /vmfs/volumes/sn1-x70-b05-vmfs-scale-ds/esxtop-captures/
total 87040
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       84.1M Jun 12 15:15 esxtop-ac-esxi-6-June-2019.csv

The above runs the esxtop capture in batch mode ( -b ), captures all available counters ( -a ), at 2 second intervals ( -d ), for 300 iterations ( -n ).  Which means that this will capture 10 minutes of performance data with 2 second intervals (shortest interval VMware supports) and output it to the 'esxtop.csv' file for review.

You will know the esxtop capture is completed once the CLI prompt returns and you are able to type again. After the esxtop has completed running, you can navigate to the path the file was saved and SCP it off the ESXi host and upload to FTPS for Pure Storage review.

Related Links and References

Here are some useful links for unlocking the power of the esxtop output that was captured.

• How to upload files to Pure Storage FTPS Service
• Exporting esxtop performance data as a CSV file
• Using esxtop to identify storage performance issues
• Using visualesxtop to troubleshoot performance issues
• Using visualesxtop on a Mac

Problem

The Pure Storage icon is not showing up in the vCenter Web Client. This can be caused the JDK not being properly installed on the VMware vCenter server.  We can verify whether the JDK is installed correctly, and which Java version is being used by the Pure Plugin in the VMware vSphere Web Client main log file (vsphere_client_virgo.log).

Impact

An incorrect installation and configuration of the JDK will cause issues with the Pure Plugin.

Solution

The Java version can be found in the vshere_client_virgo.log, and will only show up in the log when the vSphere web client is restarted.

In this example, the JDK 1.7u17 is installed on the Windows Server 2008 R2 for vCenter Server 5.1.

[2016-07-15 10:22:41.225] INFO  [INFO ] start-signalling-1            com.vmware.vise.util.debug.SystemUsageMonitor                     System info :
 OS - Windows Server 2008 R2
 Arch - amd64
 Java Version - 1.7.0_17 
[2016-07-15 10:22:41.256] INFO  [INFO ] Timer-2                       com.vmware.vise.util.debug.SystemUsageMonitor                     
 Heap     : init = 201292928(196575K) used = 309326640(302076K) committed = 672727040(656960K) max = 954466304(932096K)
 non-Heap : init = 136773632(133568K) used = 82368472(80437K) committed = 142344192(139008K) max = 318767104(311296K)
 No of loaded classes : 13796 

Problem

When viewing the Performance under the Pure Storage tab in the vSphere Web Client, you get an error "Content was blocked because it was not signed by a valid security certificate. For more information, see Certificate Errors in Internet Explorer Help".

This issue can occur in any web browser, not just Internet Explorer.

Impact

On the vSphere Web Client, the user is unable to view the Performance graph in the Pure Storage tab.

Solution

Open a new browser window or tab to log in to the Pure FlashArray GUI.  Once you are able to see the login screen of the Pure FlashArray, then the browser has accepted the SSL certificate from the Pure FlashArray.

Then go back to the vSphere Web Client, the Performance graph should now be displayed under the Pure Storage tab.

Problem

When attempting to install the Pure Storage vSphere plugin in a vSphere 5.1 environment, the following errors are reported in the vSphere virgo client logs:

[2016-06-30 09:44:02.629] ERROR [ERROR] P Connection(2)-170.92.17.57 org.eclipse.virgo.kernel.deployer.management.StandardDeployer Exception filtered from JMX invocation org.eclipse.virgo.kernel.deployer.core.DeploymentException: Error creating bean with name 'FlashArrayDataAdapter': Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'FlashArrayDataAdapterImpl' defined in URL [bundleentry://243.fwk971840267/META-INF/spring/bundle-context.xml]: Instantiation of bean failed; nested exception is java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/purestorage/rest/exceptions/PureException : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'FlashArrayDataAdapterImpl' defined in URL [bundleentry://243.fwk971840267/META-INF/spring/bundle-context.xml]: Instantiation of bean failed; nested exception is java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/purestorage/rest/exceptions/PureException : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
Caused by: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/purestorage/rest/exceptions/PureException : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
at com.purestorage.FlashArrayDataAdapter.<clinit>(Unknown Source)

Impact

vSphere Plugin Pure Storage icon does not show up on vSphere Web Client.

Solution

The error message "Unsupported major.minor version 51.0" is coming from Java and does not mean that vCenter 5.1 is not supported. This message indicates that the vCenter 5.1 is not using JDK 7.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_class_file for a list of mapping from JDK version to the major version of the class file:

major version number of the class file format being used.

Java SE 7 = 51 (0x33 hex)

vCenter 5.1 comes with JDK 6 by default, which would cause this exception. The solution is to update to JDK 7u17 as per the vSphere Plugin FAQ for the vSphere plugin to work.

Link to the JDK 7u17:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/java-archive-downloads-javase7-521261.html#jdk-7u17-oth-JPR

Problem

The customer is unable to provision new VMs on a new pure volume, even though the volume is not full and after increasing the volume size.

In this example, the Pure datastore shows only 52% full on the ESXi host. See attached "Puredatastore" screenshot.

~ # df -h

Filesystem   Size   Used Available Use% Mounted on

VMFS-5      41.0T  21.2T     19.8T  52% /vmfs/volumes/puredatastore

The Pure FlashArray shows the volume is provisioned 41TB but only a total of 1.2TB is used with a high data reduction ratio.

purevol list --space
Name                                        Size     Thin Provisioning  Data Reduction  Total Reduction  Volume   Snapshots  Shared Space  System  Total  
VM_Storage                                  41T      73%                7.9 to 1        30.2 to 1        939.07G  287.75G    -             -       1.20T  

The error in the VMkernel log shows:

FS3DM: 2004: status No space left on device copying 1 extents between two files, bytesTransferred = 0 extentsTransferred: 0".

Impact

The customer is unable to provision larger size VMs on a Pure datastore mounted to the ESXi host. Creating a VM which is 10G of size works, but creating a 30GB VM fails.

Solution

Follow the solution provided in VMware KB
https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...rnalId=1007638 to gather the output and troubleshoot this issue:

vmkfstools -P -v 10 /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name

The following output shows that the datastore is running low on the pointer (Ptr) blocks or inodes, which is why it is full.

~ # vmkfstools -P -v 10 /vmfs/volumes/puredatastore/
VMFS-5.60 file system spanning 1 partitions.
File system label (if any): puredatastore
Mode: public ATS-only
Capacity 45079708303360 (42991360 file blocks * 1048576), 21463906123776 (20469576 blocks) avail, max file size 69201586814976
Volume Creation Time: Wed Aug 13 06:40:01 2014
Files (max/free): 130000/116451
Ptr Blocks (max/free): 64512/245
Sub Blocks (max/free): 32000/29350
Secondary Ptr Blocks (max/free): 256/256
File Blocks (overcommit/used/overcommit %): 0/22521784/0
Ptr Blocks  (overcommit/used/overcommit %): 0/64267/0
Sub Blocks  (overcommit/used/overcommit %): 0/2650/0
Volume Metadata size: 1023770624
UUID: 53eb0841-1faf6578-b865-ecf4bbc519f8
Logical device: 53eb083d-9bd41bc0-17ca-ecf4bbc519f8
Partitions spanned (on "lvm"):
        naa.624a9370a2aedf261ad6c61800011010:1
Is Native Snapshot Capable: YES
OBJLIB-LIB: ObjLib cleanup done.

There is not enough Ptr blocks to satisfy a larger VM which require more PTR blocks. The solution would be to do the following: