Knowledge Base

Performance snapshots are continuous snapshots of proc nodes, collected at defined intervals for a specified period. Technical support may ask you to send performance snapshots to help troubleshoot a performance issue in response to a service request that you opened.

To collect the performance snapshots, run this command:

• ESX/ESXi 4.1 and earlier releases: vm-support -s
• ESXi 5.0: vm-support -p

You may specify the collection duration and interval in seconds using these command-line options:

• ESX/ESXi 4.1 and earlier releases: vm-support -s -d <duration> -i <interval>
• ESXi 5.0: vm-support -p -d <duration> -i <interval>

If an interval is not specified, vm-support automatically sets the interval period to twice the amount of time taken to collect a single snapshot. For most cases, VMware recommends that you set the interval period to 10 seconds.

Note: To run the vm-support command, you have to log in to your ESX host with root privileges using the console or an SSH session.

The collected snapshots are bundled with regular data collected by vm-support and a tar archive is created in /var/tmp/esx-2010-01-26--20.46.3236587.tgz. If you want to collect only performance snapshots without the regular data, substitute the -s with an uppercase -S.

It is important that you use the vm-support script to capture performance snapshots when your system is experiencing a performance problem. The script cannot collect useful data otherwise. If the snapshot collection interval overlaps with a time when the virtual machine is not experiencing a performance problem, the result may skew the data collected and can make analysis difficult.

The vm-support script shipped with ESX Server 2.1.x and earlier versions does not have the capability to collect performance snapshots. You can upgrade to a version of the script that does have this capability, however. Download the the vm-support script in Collecting diagnostic information for VMware ESX/ESXi using the vSphere Client (653). This article also contains related information about collecting debug information for ESX systems.

Note: You do not need to run vmmstats.pl in ESX Server 2.1.x if you download and use this version of vm-support.

For a checklist to help you report performance problems, see Performance Problem Report Check List . For a technical note about isolating performance problems, see Isolating Performance Problems.

For more information, see Uploading diagnostic information to VMware (1008525).

Additional Information:

See also, Collecting performance data for ESXi5.0 hosts via the vSphere5 client.