vmware vsphere counters..

2009 July
The vSphere Client Online Help has this to say about Virtual Machine Performance:
“In a virtualized environment, physical resources are shared among multiple virtual machines. Some virtualization processes dynamically allocate available resources depending on the status, or utilization rates, of virtual machines in the environment. This can make obtaining accurate information about the resource utilization (CPU utilization, in particular) of individual virtual machines, or applications running within virtual machines, difficult. VMware now provides virtual machine-specific performance counter libraries for the Windows Performance utility. Application administrators can view accurate virtual machine resource utilization statistics from within the guest operating system’s Windows Performance utility.”
Did you notice the explicit statement about Perfmon? Perfmon is Microsoft Windows Performance Monitor or perfmon.exe for short. Whereas the legacy VMware Descheduled Time Accounting Service supported both Windows and Linux guest VMs, its successor currently supports Perfmon ala Windows guest VMs only. It seems we’ve gone backwards in functionality from a Linux guest VM perspective. Another pie in the face for shops with Linux guest VMs.
Rant…