VMware – managing virtual switches inside your ESX Server

Denny-

It's a good thought, but from what I understand, the VM switches are generally dumb. They aren't configurable (like a physical switch), aren't manageable, they don't pass STP, etc. I have never experienced an issue with the virtual switches, but our VM guy is pretty good so he knows how to configure them. Even on my test system, I've never had a problem, but I have not purposely tried to break it either. I'd be interested in hearing if/how we can monitor them.
 
Collin 

 I personally would like to have a better handle on the traffic that flows across the vSwitches in our VMware environment. We have a number of servers that our application staff swears is our fault for performance. We are looking at additional tools to dive into the server and disk systems in VMware, better network information would be beneficial as well.

 As an aside, if the APM also provided information about the VMware environment, that would be beneficial. Again, our application developers have figured out how to write code in such a way that 100% of the fastest machines on the planet are still not enough to handle their code.

 Details include, vCPU time assigned, Real CPU time, I/O wait time, Memory stats such shared pages, the ballon. On top of all this the reservation vs available statistics.

I would really need to sit down and think about what stats would be the most important. I bet if we had them all I could find a nugget of useful information like I did with Orion and Netflow when I discovered the 2 to 3GB file copies across a T-1 every time a person logged on.

We have several VM ware server here with multiple VM switches.  We would like to see up/down, traffic flow, packet loss to them.

Yea I can see the guest servers and their nic's but seeing this info for the host would be great.

Physical servers with dedicated networks ports are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. On a daily basis our organization is virtualizing its physical servers. This is making network services job of providing feedback/performance monitoring very difficult. Any and all visibility, performance reporting that Orion can do for ESX infrastructure is so desperately needed.

I would like to see at least the same information for virtual switch interfaces that we can currently see with physical switch interfaces in Orion. Being able to identify the VMs that are the top bandwidth users would assist me in telling the Server Admins that the network is not the problem. We haven't experienced any problems yet, but I just know (based on history) that it is only a matter of time.

Our biggest concern is that the server team will configure one of the virtual switches wrong and we could end up with routing problems. As it stands now they have to ask the Network team for the change, we make sure that the change will not conflict with any thing and after the change we monitor the traffic from the change to make sure we do not have any problems. But with virtual switches that is out of the Network team hands.

Our Tech Support Team likes Orion very much and they like that they can go to one system now and see everything that is going on with both the servers and the network.