With the release of ESX 3 and VirtualCenter 2 we got a lot of new features but we lost ‘vmkusage’, a graphical interface which was a great help in solving problems. But today I read the release notes of vCenter 2.5 update 4 and now ‘vmkusage’ is back again! It is not available in the normal installation procedure but it is well worth the hassle.

Check this VMware article to see how to install ‘vmkusage/performance overview’ and mind the three notes at the end of the article.

After the installation you will see a Performance Overview tab, on host, resource pool or VM, which displays a single view of key performance metrics for CPU, memory, disk, and network without navigating through multiple charts. Just like the old days :-)

Here some screenshots from run-virtual.com.