In the previous post about the ESXi network IOchain we explored the various constructs that belong to the network path. This blog post builds on top of that and focuses on the tools for advanced network troubleshooting and verification. Today, vSphere ESXi is packaged with a extensive toolset that helps you to check connectivity or verify bandwidth availability. Some tools are not only applicable for inside your ESXi box, but also very usable for the physical network components involved in the network paths.
Access to the ESXi shell is a necessity as the commands are executed here. A good starting point for connectivity troubleshooting is the esxtop network view. Also, the esxcli network commandlet provides a lot of information. We also have (vmk)ping, traceroute at our disposal. However, if you are required to dig deeper into an network issue, the following list of tools might help you out:
- net-stats
- pktcap-uw
- nc
- iperf
Net-stats
We’ll start of with one of my favorites; net-stats. This command can get you a lot of deep dive insights on what is happening under the covers of networking on a ESXi host as it can collect port stats and . The command is quite extensive as it allows for a lot of options. The net-stats -h command displays all flags. The most common one being the list option. Use net-stats -l to determine the switchport numbers and MAC addresses for all VMkernel interfaces, vmnic uplinks and vNIC ports. This information is also used for input for other tools described in the blog post.
To give some more examples, net-stats can also provide in-depth details on what worldlets (or CPU threads, listed as “sys”) are spun up for handling network IO by issuing net-stats with the following flags: net-stats -A -t vW. Output provided by these options help in verifying if NetQueue or Receive Side Scaling (RSS) is active for vmnic’s by mapping the “sys” output to the worldlet name using i.e. the vsi shell (vsish -e cat /world/<world id>/name).
Using different options, net-stats provides great insights on network behaviour.
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