vSphere Network Performance Troubleshooting - Part I

Facing network related issue in your vSphere environment and don’t know what and where to start because it incorporates various steps to gather information related to switch being used (VSS or DVS), its firmware and driver information, packet received/transferred and link status etc.

Its obvious we already have commands to run on ESXi shell to gather all relevant network stats, information and some advanced traits as well. However sometimes it would be efficient to have these accumulated detail on stdout in ESXi shell against one single command in order to quickly overview this already segregated statistics.

Here is the one liner bash command for not only having enough information to start digging efficiently but also have some extra network configuration details to look into.

esxcli network nic list; for i in $(esxcli network nic list | grep -i vmnic* | awk '{print $1}');do echo "Gathering the information for:";echo $i;esxcli network nic get -n $i | egrep -i "name|link*|cable|virtual|driver|version";echo Dropped packets and errors are :;esxcli network nic stats get -n $i | grep -iE "vmnic|dropped|errors";echo "";echo "Enabling the VLAN stats on $i for now:=========";esxcli network nic vlan stats set -e true -n $i;echo The VLAN stats for $i:;esxcli network nic vlan stats get -n $i;echo "";echo "Disabling the VLAN stats on $i:===============";esxcli network nic vlan stats set -e false -n $i;echo "";done

The output of above script is as pasted below:

Here we also have VLAN stats getting enabled for each VMNIC being used by which switch and then getting disabled after collecting VLAN sent/received packets for these individual VMNICs. With this detail we can start identifying the issue.

I will have such network related information for every virtual machine in my next post e.g. network stats related to port ID against each world ID associated with virtual machines running in the ESXi host for more granular troubleshooting. Stay tuned till then..

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