Summary: A short post about using esxtop on vmware esx hosts.
Date: Around 2016
Refactor: 4 January 2025: Checked links and formatting.

Esxtop allows monitoring and collection of data for all system resources: CPU, memory, disk and network. When used interactively, this data can be viewed on different types of screens; one each for CPU statistics, memory statistics, network statistics, disk adapter statistics, disk device statistics, disk VM statistics and interrupt statistics.

esxtop

You can switch view in esxtop using these characters:

• c: cpu
• m: memory
• d: disk
• n: network

Say you want to show the ZERO pages in the Memory page:

• Go to the memory page (m)
• Type f to get an overview of available columns
• Type m to select the COW columns (Now you get ZERO and a couple of other columns as well) and enter to go back to the memory overview.

If you want to see esxtop just for Virtual machines launch it, and type V for only VMs. Type V again to view everything again.

ESXTOP bible (for download)
ESXTOP on Yellow-bricks: Shorter and more practical article