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Where are the "Power" Perf Metrics in the vSphere API?

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A recent question was posed on the VMTN developer forum on how to obtain the new power utilization metrics using the vSphere API. This new performance metric was introduced with the release of vSphere 4.x and can be seen using either esxtop or resxtop and specifying the "p" option for power if you are on an ESX or ESXi host.

You can also get these counters by using the vSphere Client and using the Advanced Charts:

This actually seemed like a simple enough question, pointing the user over to the vSphere API reference documentation under the perfManager. Though after taking a second look, it appears that no such metric exists in the documentation from VMware:

After a few minutes of digging around, I found that Power metrics actually do in fact exists but were not properly documented when they were first introduced. I wrote a quick vSphere SDK for Perl script called perfQuery.pl looking for metrics that were related to "power" and I identified the following:

As you can see these match up to those seen using the vSphere Client and I output the metrics using its rollup type, units, internal name and metric description. While writing this script, I also noticed there were two other performance metric types that existed and were not documented by VMware. Here is a mapping of the API performance metric keys to vSphere API perfManager, the last two including power metric types are undocumented by VMware:

vSphere Client Chart Option vSphere API Perf Metric Key Documented
Cluster Services clusterServices yes
CPU cpu yes
Management Agent managementAgent yes
Memory mem yes
Network net yes
Resource Scheduler rescpu yes
Storage Capacity disk yes
Datastore datastore yes
Disk disk yes
Virtual Disk virtualDisk yes
Storage Adapter storageAdapter yes
Storage Path storagePath yes
System sys yes
Virtual Machine Operations vmop yes
Power power no
vCenter Resources vcResources no
vCenter Debug Info vcDebugInfo no

Using the script and the performance metric key, you can actually query either all or a specific metric type that you are interested in. This is helpful, for those metrics that have not been publicly documented by VMware. However, the power metric should have been documented and I believe this to be a documentation bug that was missed by VMware.

Download: perfQuery.pl

If you are interested in learning more about the vSphere statistics and performance monitoring, I highly recommend checking out Luc Dekens three part series (Part1, Part2 and Part3) on vSphere performance monitoring. Even though his posts are specific to PowerCLI, all the concepts discussed apply to all the vSphere SDKs when dealing with performance monitoring using the vSphere APIs.

vGhetto Tech Exchange VMworld 2010 Video

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Back in September, I presented at my very first VMworld: vGhetto - Communities Building Great Solutions (PPC-07) alongside Edward Haletky at Tech Exchange VMworld 2010. For those that missed the session, the famous Pablo Roesch of VMware has graciously uploaded our presentation to Vimeo 🙂

You can view the presentation here.

vGhetto - Communities Building Great Solutions from heyitspablo on Vimeo.

vMotion' With Style

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I got this idea after catching an interesting tweet by Cody Bunch last Friday:

I had just recently finished a post on How to Ack & Reset vCenter Alarm implementing hidden API method and thought this might work by using a vCenter alarm. After few hours in our skunkwork's lab, I found "a" method to exactly what Cody wished for. If you can not wait, jump straight to the video at the bottom 🙂

The following tools were used:

  • PsExec -Windows utility to perform remote operations
  • SayStatic - Windows text to speech utility
  • A random mp3 audio file found online

The environment consisted of two vESXi 4.1 hosts and Windows XP VM residing on shared storage that was vMotion functional:

You will need to upload some files to your vCenter server and to the desktop in which you want to implement this hack.

Local Desktop Server Setup

1) Download SayStatic to your local desktop ( in the example, it is located on the desktop)

2) Download a playable mp3 file (in the example, it is located on the desktop)

Note: If you decide to change the path to the files above, please make note of the path as it will be used later in the alarm script.

Here is a screenshot of my local desktop:

vCenter Server Setup

1) Download PsTools toolkit and extract the contents to your vCenter Server and make a note of the path (in the example, it is located on the desktop)

2) Create an alarm script and make a note of the path ( in the example, it is located in C:\alarm.cmd)

The alarm.cmd should contain the following:

You will need to edit the script and update at minimum the following variables:
REMOTE_SERVER = This is the hostname or IP address of your local desktop, make sure you keep the double slashes which is needed

REMOTE_USERNAME = This is the username to login to your local desktop and it should be the one you use to login else you will not see anything interesting. Make sure you include both the Domain and username, if your system is not part of a domain, use the local system name else the script will fail.

REMOTE_PASSWORD = The password to the account aove

Note: If you have changed the path of the files on either the local desktop or vCenter Server, you will need edit the remainder variables that specify where to look for the executable's.

Here is a screenshot of vCenter Server desktop:

vCenter Alarm:

Finally, we need to create an alarm in vCenter, you can create this at any level of the vCenter infrastructure.

1) Create an alarm and give it a name and ensure the type is of "Virtual Machines" and monitor type is "Monitor for specific events occurring on this object" (in the example, I call it VMOTIONIN_WITH_STYLE)

2) Now click on the Triggers tab and look for an event type called "VM emigrating", no this is not a typo. VMware apparently has both "VM migrating" and "VM emigrating", apparently the functional alarm is under the name emigrating ... don't ask me why they called it that ;). Make sure the status is set to "alert"

3) Next, click on the Actions tab and set the action to "Run a command" and specify the configuration to the path of the alarm.cmd. In the example, I stored the script in C:\alarm.cmd and then make sure it alarms when it hits "red" or error and then click okay for the alarm to be created.

Now you are ready to go. Instead of explaining and providing screenshots, I thought I show you what this would look like (explanation of what is going on is at the very bottom).

Without further ado, here is a recorded video of this in action:

vMotion' With Style from lamw on Vimeo.

What is actually going on:
When a vMotion is triggered, it will fire off the alarm.cmd script which basically uses SayStatic.exe to remotely execute on your local desktop to announce the virtual machine being vMotioned by capturing the VMware specific environmental variables and then it will also remotely playing the local audio file using Windows Media Player.One caveat that I was not able to solve, was clearing the alarm after the vMotion. You will notice the virtual machines that vMotion and fire off this alarm will stay alerted and will not play again until it has been resetted to green. I thought about creating another alarm to clear this initial alarm but it did not actually clear the alarm.

There you have it, vMotioin' with style ... though cool in concept, I doubt you will last very long with this kicking off on every single vMotion in your environment.

Big thanks to Cody Bunch for the idea! 🙂