VMware vSphere 5.5 has introduced support for applications which do have special requirements concerning Latency sensitivity. Perhaps it's your interest and you should know that there is a new free utility at VMware Labs website called Latency Sensitivity Troubleshooting Tool. The tool has been released recently to help troubleshoot options concerning application latency.
The tool is available as experimental and you must agree to the technical agreement before downloading. This is usual process for all utilities from VMware labs website.
The Latency Sensitivity Troubleshooting Tool provides scripts and examples to troubleshoot configuration and performance problems with the Latency Sensitivity feature in VMware vSphere 5.5.
The engineers: Lenin Singaravelu, Jin Heo, Haoqiang Zheng, Shilpi Agarwal, Bhavesh Davda, Garrett Smith.
Features
- Python script that runs on ESXi to check virtual machine and physical NIC (PNIC) configuration to monitor host, virtual machine, and PNIC performance.
- Python program to process traces from pktcap-uw for a ping workload and print time spent in ESXi on the receive path, time spent in the virtual machine, and time spent in ESXi on the transmit path.
- A simple C program demonstrating the trace format generated by pktcap-uw. The C program was tested on an x86_64 Linux virtual machine.
- Example SystemTap scripts to break down ping and netperf TCP_RR latencies inside a Red Hat Linux guest.
These scripts were tested on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 virtual machine.
A screenshot from the tool's page at VMware Labs.
In the download file there is a technical PDF: Latency Sensitivity Features in vSphere 5.5: Diagnosing Performance Problems. An indispensable resource to work with.
Download from this link at VMware Labs.
