Virtual machines currently running on ESXi host

You might need to see what virtual machines are hosted in which ESXi hosts when doing the following:

• Monitoring VMware virtual machine performance

Prerequisites 

In order to execute this procedure in your environment, you may need to first on-board the data, services, or apps shown in the following table.

Example

The purpose of this example is to show how this procedure works in a general environment. In your environment, you can optimize the search by specifying an index, a time range, or a different data source. 

Understanding which ESXi host is currently running a virtual machine is a fundamental aspect of VMware monitoring. It lets you see all virtual machines running on an ESXi host and determine if poor performance could be caused by a noisy neighbor. You want a search that will allow you to easily gather this type of inventory.

1. Run the following search: 

sourcetype=vmware:inv:hierarchy type=VirtualMachine moid="*"
|stats values(moid) AS "VM Id" BY _time changeSet.runtime.host.moid 
|rename changeSet.runtime.host.moid AS "ESXi Host"

Search Explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Result 

Sample results for this search are shown in the table below. It provides a list of virtual machines (VM) running on a host at the time the data was received by Splunk. The first five entries show vm-77 moving back and forth between host-10 and host-11. The table also shows that host-10 is hosting many VMs at T13:49 and that host-26 has only three. That information could be used to consider host-26 as a candidate to balance the load by moving some VMs off of host-10. 

This search would be good in a dashboard with an interactive input to select VM IDs to investigate. A second input on the same dashboard could allow for the ESXi Host to be selected, rather than defaulting to all.