Monitoring a virtual environment

How can we monitor the environment? You can use two ways: the first from a OS VM perspective and the second from a third-party tools perspective. 

We can use two views to monitor the environment:

• Inside the Guest OS tools: Task Manager or top
• Outside the Guest OS tools: vCenter Server performance charts or esxtop

As per my point of view and experience, CLI is better and more helpful than GUI tools. However, of course, you can find any GUI that you love.

CLI usage

CLI is the most useful option for TRBL. There are a lot of CLIs available that are used for TRBL in a VMware environment:

• vSphere ESXi shell: esxcli which is the new CLI
• vSphere command-line interface vCLI: esxcfg-*  which is the old CLI

Both CLIs can be used directly from an ESXi host and the ESXi shell must be enabled in the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI). You can access the DCUI from the physical console of the host or also remotely using a specific hardware vendor cards, like iDRAC for Dell or iLO...