For VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) installations, the resxtop tool is what you use for troubleshooting through the vSphere Command-Line Interface (vSphere CLI) or the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). Here’s a basic step-by-step tutorial on how to use the resxtop tool through vMA.

Read my tip on installing and configuring the vMA. You’ll see that it’s quite easy to connect to a server through the vMA (Figure A).
Figure A

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Once you’re in resxtop, you should maximize the PuTTY screen (Figure B).
Figure B

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Resxtop contains a lot of important information. The running virtual machines are in the Name column. In Figure B, the 10 virtual machines running on this ESXi host are in yellow boxes with the name VMETEST00x. The column headers in the red box are described below:

  • NWLD: Resource pool number of the specified running world.
  • %USED: Percentage of CPU currently used within the resource pool, the virtual machine, or the running world.
  • %RUN: Percentage of total time scheduled. (This is a CPU metric.)
  • %SYS: Time percentage spent by the hypervisor (vmkernel) for the specified resource pool, the virtual machine, or the running world.
  • %WAIT: Time percentage that the resource pool, the virtual machine, or the running world exists in the busy wait or blocked state.
  • %RDY: Time percentage that the resource pool, the virtual machine, or the running world is ready to run. (This is not a good measure; it’s a misnomer of sorts for virtual machines.)
  • %IDLE: Time that the virtual machine, the resource pool, or the running world was idle.
  • %OVRLP: Time spent scheduling on behalf of another virtual machine, resource pool, or running world.
  • %CSTP: Time percentage that the resource pool is ready to co-schedule.
  • %MLMTD: Percentage of time the host intentionally did not allow a resource pool, a virtual machine, or a running world to run.
  • %SWPWT: Swap wait time is an additional metric that is part of %WAIT.

Read the vSphere Command-Line Reference for more information on resxtop.

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