VOD or VPX operational dashboard was introduced in vCenter Server 2.0.1 as a debugging/troubleshooting tool integrated with vCenter Server. It displays a dashboard of the Virtual Center runtime state and some internal statistics. This was not publicly announced but was used by VMware personnel for troubleshooting. It still exists today in the vCenter Server 5.5.

VOD also saves all of the runtime statistics periodically into the vpxd-profiler.log or profiler.log and is enabled by default.

So where do you enable or disable the VOD?

Edit the vpxd.cfg file, usually found under C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\ and add the below parameters within the and tags.

<vod>  
<enabled>true</enabled>  
<logSize>209715200</logSize>  
<numFiles>2</numFiles>  
</vod>

The following basic counters can be obtained through VOD:
Number of:

  1. Host syncs,
  2. Molock retries
  3. Property changes
  4. property collector operations
  5. RMIs
  6. VC operations - power ons, clone, create vm, reconfigure vm.
  7. Clients connected
  8. Uptime of the VC server.
  9. Objects allocated (Scoreboard)

Latency of:

  1. Host syncs
  2. Molock retries
  3. property collector operations
  4. RMIs
  5. VC operations - power ons, clone, create vm, reconfigure vm.

So how do you access the VOD?
Open a browser, point to, https:///vod/index.html and voilà!