Increasing the width of the name field in esxtop to display full object names

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to change the width of the name field column in esxtop for allowing it to display longer object names.

Symptoms:
esxtop has a specific field size configured for the name column in each of its views, when being used in interactive mode. When some of the objects in the inventory of your ESXi, such as virtual machines, data stores etc. have long names, these might get cut off due to this preconfigured limitation.
For example, you can view the performance statistics for each disk device, but the DEVICE field does not show the complete NAA identifier of each disk.

Environment

VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Resolution

To increase the width of the device name field:

1. Start esxtop by running the esxtop command.
2. Change to the tab you want to review (for example press u to switch to the disk device display).
3. Press L (note that this is upper case) to change the name field size.
4. Enter the number of characters you want to use as the new field length (e.g. use 36 as the value to display the complete NAA identifier in the disk device display)

Note: The name field size is not permanently changed, but will be reset to its default value every time you restart esxtop

Additional Information

Using esxtop to identify storage performance issues for ESX / ESXi (multiple versions)