Ever wanted to know how often DRS is vmotioning your VMs?
You can extract this info from the VC database by the following query:
With the following SQL command, you can extract the info:
SELECT vpx_event.event_type, vpx_event.vm_name, vpx_event.create_time from vpx_event where event_type like ‘%migrate%’
(Credits go to: Dave.Mishchenko http://communities.vmware.com/message/969563)
Now if you filter on the event_type “vim.event.DrsVmMigratedEvent” you see all DRS Vmotions. Eventtype vim.event.VmMigratedEvent is for manual vmotions.
Looking at the VI environment my customer is running, I got the following results (after playing a bit in Excel):
Over a period of 285 days, we had:
1962 DRS vmotions (6.8 per day)
181 Manual vmotions (0.63 per day)
And the VMs that got vmotioned most often:
vm01 (2vcpu 4Gb) 49x
vm02 (4vcpu 4Gb) 44x
vm03 (2vcpu 1,5Gb) 41x
vm04 (4vcpu 4Gb) 39x
vm05 (4vcpu 4Gb) 35x
This out of a total of 400+ VMs.
Can you filter out the DRS VMotions that were done due to hosts been put in maintenance mode? Presumably over a period of 285 days they patched at least once, and DRS does really help out here in saving us having to VMotion the ~20 to 50 VMs manually, but these VMotions are arguable human initiated and not DRS initiated.
Hi
That is a good comment, I would have to look into that. I have no ESX host home to put into maintenance mode. So I can’t test it.
I do however see that there are three entries:
vim.event.EnteredMaintenanceModeEvent
vim.event.EnteringMaintenanceModeEvent
vim.event.ExitMaintenanceModeEvent
These would be key events to figure this out.
Gabrie
Does this also work for you on ESX 3.5 update1 ?
I cant find any event_type like ‘%migrate%’…
@Danni: If you are quering a database of a cluster that has never done any vmotions, chances are that you can’t find this event type.
Gabrie
Hi again,
I must have had some syntax error in my previous query – It works now :-) Thanks.
What I am trying to accomplish is an overview of vmotions and WHY the vmotion happened. If you have any great ideas :-)
This is quite impressive, I am pleased to read this post, keep posts like this coming, you totally rock!
Cheers,
gadgettechblog.com