Why use a third-party performance monitoring tool?
With VMware’s all-encompassing virtualization offering, some may question why third-party tools are necessary. I’m a big fan of third-party tools (especially free third-party tools) because they can present information in different formats, answer questions and provide additional functionality that VMware ESX Server and the VMware Infrastructure (VI) suite do not. And using third-party tools is something that system admins need experience with for any operating system or virtualization platform, such as VMware ESX Server. More specifically, you want to use a third-party performance tool with VMware ESX Server/VI Suite for the following reasons: • You want additional historical information than VMware ESX provides (going back more than one year). • You would like modeling and what-if performance scenario information. What, for example, would happen if I swap an ESX host for a new host with more CPU and RAM? What would happen if I migrate this VM guest to a higher-performing disk array?
