The resxtop utility can be run from the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). The resxtop utility is used to monitor CPU, memory, network, and disk utilization of vSphere ESX/i hosts.
There are a many different fields that can be displayed for each resource. When monitoring or troubleshooting a resource it is often helpful to only display necessary fields or to display fields other than the defaults. This is easily done by toggling available fields for a resource on or off and reordering the displayed fields. Once fields for a resource are set up as needed the configuration can then be saved to a file and recalled later when running resxtop.
In this example I want to monitor the I/O stats of the ESXi host’s disk adapters.
To run resxtop: resxtop –server <ESX/i Server Name or IP> –username <ESX/i Username>
I am prompted for the ESX/i password.
By default resxtop starts showing CPU resource utilization for the specified host.
Typing a question mark “?” while running resxtop will display help for the current resource and keys used to switch resources.
Hit any key to exit the help.
Type “d” to change the displayed resource to disk adapters.
Type “f” to toggle which fields I want to display.
For this example I only want to display the Adapter (A) and the IO Stats (E). So I toggle off all except A and E.
Resxtop now only displays the Adapter name, and the IO Stats (Commands/second, Reads/second, Writes/second, Megabytes Read/second, and Megabytes Written/second).
To save the configuration to be recalled later type “W” (that is a capital W) and I am prompted for a file name. By default resxtop will save the configuration to .esxtop41rc (vMA 4.1), if I save to this file then the configuration will be the default configuration when resxtop is run.
Type the path to where I want to save the configuration. For this example I am using /home/vi-admin/esxtop-dkadptr-io
I can now recall this configuration by running: resxtop –server <ESX/i Server Name or IP> –username <ESX/i Username> -c /home/vi-admin/esxtop-dkadptr-io
For more information on using resxtop check out the vSphere Resource Management Guide. There is also a man page available on the vMA (man resxtop).
