Understand and replay cloud platform SDK with vimShark

In this paper, we present vimShark, an automated monitoring/analyzing/replaying tool which identifies and extracts VMware vSphere Web Services API to effectively understand the communications between various vSphere components and Virtual Infrastructure Management (VIM) solutions. This has proven useful in the performance analysis of various VMware management solution products with VMware vCenter Server and VMware ESX (hypervisor) hosts. The contribution of this paper is twofold. 1) vimShark-recorder and analyzer is non-intrusive and easy to install, while incurring negligible CPU and memory overhead. It understands vSphere Web Services API messages by decoding them, providing detailed information and stats that are useful for the analysis of VIM communication between vCenter server, ESX hosts and various VIM solution products. 2) vimShark-replayer serves as a replay/workload generator tool for vSphere Web Services API. It analyzes the vimShark traces and generates Java code to replay the same traces on any underlying vSphere setup. The efficacy of vimShark has been demonstrated with various VIM solution products including VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, VMware vCenter Update Manager, VMware vCenter Capacity IQ, and VMware vSphere Client.