Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – vscsiStats

While going over TA1541 – Cool Little Things Marketing Did Not Tell You About vSphere 4.0 from this years VMworld, and came across this gem, a service console tool, that’s been there since ESX 3.5, and will report on all sorts of SCSI statistics.

[root@esxServerOfDoom root]# /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -?
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats: invalid option — ?
  VscsiStats — This tool controls vscsi data collection for virtual machine disk
                disk I/O workload characterization. Users can start and stop online data
                data collection for particular VMs as well as print out online histogram data.
                Command traces can also be collected and printed.

Awesome, no? It gets better. This doc: “Using vscsiStats for Storage Performance Analysis” is a must read, as are the docs it links to:

Go GO GO!