Performance monitoring in a virtual machine is different from that in a traditional physical server. The virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a key component of the VMware vSphere environment, which is a thin layer that provides virtual x86 hardware for virtual machines' (VM) guest operating systems. VMware administrators are needed in order to know how to find performance problems using vSphere monitoring tools. VMware vCenter Server's performance charts and resxtop
commands, which are common tools, can help you find performance problems in the vSphere Server.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
The components of the VMware vSphere ESXi architecture
What the virtual machine monitor is
The difference between software and hardware virtualization techniques
Using vSphere Performance monitoring tools