18.8. Virtual machine performance monitoring tools


To identify what consumes the most VM resources and which aspect of VM performance needs optimization, performance diagnostic tools, both general and VM-specific, can be used.

Default OS performance monitoring tools

For standard performance evaluation, you can use the utilities provided by default by your host and guest operating systems:

  • On your RHEL 10 host, as root, use the top utility or the system monitor application, and look for qemu and virt in the output. This shows how much host system resources your VMs are consuming.

    • If the monitoring tool displays that any of the qemu or virt processes consume a large portion of the host CPU or memory capacity, use the perf utility to investigate. For details, see below.
    • In addition, if a vhost_net thread process, named for example vhost_net-1234, is displayed as consuming an excessive amount of host CPU capacity, consider using virtual network optimization features, such as multi-queue virtio-net.
  • On the guest operating system, use performance utilities and applications available on the system to evaluate which processes consume the most system resources.

    • On Linux systems, you can use the top utility.
    • On Windows systems, you can use the Task Manager application.

perf kvm

You can use the perf utility to collect and analyze virtualization-specific statistics about the performance of your RHEL 10 host. To do so:

  1. On the host, install the perf package:

    # dnf install perf
  2. Use one of the perf kvm stat commands to display perf statistics for your virtualization host:

    • For real-time monitoring of your hypervisor, use the perf kvm stat live command.
    • To log the perf data of your hypervisor over a period of time, activate the logging by using the perf kvm stat record command. After the command is canceled or interrupted, the data is saved in the perf.data.guest file, which can be analyzed by using the perf kvm stat report command.
  3. Analyze the perf output for types of VM-EXIT events and their distribution. For example, the PAUSE_INSTRUCTION events should be infrequent, but in the following output, the high occurrence of this event suggests that the host CPUs are not handling the running vCPUs well. In such a scenario, consider shutting down some of your active VMs, removing vCPUs from these VMs, or tuning the performance of the vCPUs.

    # perf kvm stat report
    
    Analyze events for all VMs, all VCPUs:
    
    
                 VM-EXIT    Samples  Samples%     Time%    Min Time    Max Time         Avg time
    
      EXTERNAL_INTERRUPT     365634    31.59%    18.04%      0.42us  58780.59us    204.08us ( +-   0.99% )
               MSR_WRITE     293428    25.35%     0.13%      0.59us  17873.02us      1.80us ( +-   4.63% )
        PREEMPTION_TIMER     276162    23.86%     0.23%      0.51us  21396.03us      3.38us ( +-   5.19% )
       PAUSE_INSTRUCTION     189375    16.36%    11.75%      0.72us  29655.25us    256.77us ( +-   0.70% )
                     HLT      20440     1.77%    69.83%      0.62us  79319.41us  14134.56us ( +-   0.79% )
                  VMCALL      12426     1.07%     0.03%      1.02us   5416.25us      8.77us ( +-   7.36% )
           EXCEPTION_NMI         27     0.00%     0.00%      0.69us      1.34us      0.98us ( +-   3.50% )
           EPT_MISCONFIG          5     0.00%     0.00%      5.15us     10.85us      7.88us ( +-  11.67% )
    
    Total Samples:1157497, Total events handled time:413728274.66us.

    Other event types that can signal problems in the output of perf kvm stat include:

For more information about using perf to monitor virtualization performance, see the perf-kvm(1) man page on your system.

numastat

To see the current NUMA configuration of your system, you can use the numastat utility, which is provided by installing the numactl package.

The following shows a host with 4 running VMs, each obtaining memory from multiple NUMA nodes. This is not optimal for vCPU performance, and warrants adjusting:

# numastat -c qemu-kvm

Per-node process memory usage (in MBs)
PID              Node 0 Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 4 Node 5 Node 6 Node 7 Total
---------------  ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
51722 (qemu-kvm)     68     16    357   6936      2      3    147    598  8128
51747 (qemu-kvm)    245     11      5     18   5172   2532      1     92  8076
53736 (qemu-kvm)     62    432   1661    506   4851    136     22    445  8116
53773 (qemu-kvm)   1393      3      1      2     12      0      0   6702  8114
---------------  ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
Total              1769    463   2024   7462  10037   2672    169   7837 32434

In contrast, the following shows memory being provided to each VM by a single node, which is significantly more efficient.

# numastat -c qemu-kvm

Per-node process memory usage (in MBs)
PID              Node 0 Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 4 Node 5 Node 6 Node 7 Total
---------------  ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
51747 (qemu-kvm)      0      0      7      0   8072      0      1      0  8080
53736 (qemu-kvm)      0      0      7      0      0      0   8113      0  8120
53773 (qemu-kvm)      0      0      7      0      0      0      1   8110  8118
59065 (qemu-kvm)      0      0   8050      0      0      0      0      0  8051
---------------  ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
Total                 0      0   8072      0   8072      0   8114   8110 32368
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