Esxtop Output is Not Displaying Correctly

Sometimes when you connect to an ESXi host and lunch esxtop the output is not what you've expected.

Esxtop default terminal output is xterm, and your terminal might have a different one. To fix this, first, find out what is our current TERM environment variable:

# echo $TERM

You will have an output like this:

# xterm-256color

This means our current terminal emulator is connected to the ESXi host with xterm-256color. Now let's see what values this ESXi host supports:

 # find /usr/share/terminfo/ -type f

 

/usr/share/terminfo/v/vt102
/usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm
/usr/share/terminfo/s/screen
/usr/share/terminfo/l/linux
/usr/share/terminfo/a/ansi

Our terminal uses xterm-256color, which is not in this list of supported values on the ESXi emulator, so it cannot map it to any of them, thus the incorrect display of information.

We can update the environment TERM to reflect a value from the supported emulators of ESXi.

# TERM=xterm

Now check the value of TERM env variable again to see if it's set correctly:

# echo $TERM

xterm

Now you can run esxtop:

# esxtop

esxi   vmware