Answer by Dag Wieers for Measuring CPU %steal on VMware and Hyper-V hypervisors

The only way to get these (and more) performance counters inside a VMware guest, is by using the VMGuestLib SDK as shipped with the vmware-tools.

I wrote a python wrapper for this library, called python-vmguestlib and a tool vmguest-stats to get access to these counters. And there are now three Dstat plugins to correlate these performance counters with other system resources. It is as simple as:

dstat -c –vm-cpu -m –vm-mem –vm-mem-adv

You can find the python wrapper, the vmguest-stats tool and Dstat at:

• http://github.com/dagwieers/vmguestlib
• http://github.com/dagwieers/dstat

Feedback and improvements welcomed !