The vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) Performance dashboard provides an overview of the performance issues related to your vSAN clusters. The dashboard displays the read and write latency issues that affect the vSAN clusters present in your environment. You can use this dashboard to identify and troubleshoot performance issues related to Contention and Utilization across VMs that are part of the vSAN cluster.

How to Use the Dashboard

The vSAN ESA Performance dashboard is organized into sections for ease of use.
  • Cluster Analysis

    The vSAN ESA Clusters widget lists all the vSAN clusters, starting with cluster with the highest VM disk latency. By default, the widget displays data from the last 24 hours.

    The first column displays if the distribution of disk latency is experienced by all the VMs in the cluster. You can expect a majority of the VMs to experience latency that matches your expectation.

    The second column displays if any of the vSAN kernel modules have to wait for CPU. Expect this number to be near 0% and below 1%, as vSAN should not be waiting for CPU time.

    The third column displays if any of the vSAN clusters are dropping packets in the vSAN network (not the VM network). vSAN relies on the network to keep the cluster in-sync. This number should be near 0% and less than 1%.

    Select a cluster to investigate further. The VM latency distribution is automatically displayed.

  • Contention

    You can view various disk-related contention counters of the cluster from the Contention widget.

  • Utilization

    Contention metrics are complemented by utilization metrics. A large block size can result in high throughput in a relatively low IOPS. If you see a large block size when you are not expecting it, investigate which applications are using it.

  • Configuration

    You can view the configuration details such as storage type, number of VMs, ESXi, Storage Pools, Physical Disks of the selected vSAN cluster.

  • Storage Pools

    You can view the configuration, contention, and utilization details of the Storage Pool for the selected vSAN cluster.

  • Physical Disks

    You can view the configuration, contention, and utilization details of the Physical Disks for the selected vSAN cluster.

  • Related Objects to Selected vSAN Cluster

    You can view the details of the related objects for the selected vSAN cluster.