VTune Amplifier XE hung up a VM when doing advanced-hotspots profiling

[Liyang_X_]

I was trying to do an advanced-hotspots profiling on a VM (ESXi 6.0, Guest OS: Linux) using VTune Amplifier XE 2016. VTune 2016 works well on bare-metal machines (the linux distro), but gets the whole the VM hang up. The command line I used is:

amplxe-cl --collect  advanced-hotspots -knob sampling-interval=5 -duration 120

or

amplxe-cl --collect  advanced-hotspots -knob sampling-interval=5 -duration 120 --target-pid 6268

I heard that VTune collector now support driverless capture using perf in Version 2016. Is there anything wrong with my commands for VM?

[Peter_W_Intel]

About using VTune(TM) Amplifier XE 2016, please see below in release-notes:

EBS analysis within a virtual machine is available in the following environments
virtualizing the on-chip Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU):
  VMware Fusion* 5 and higher
  KVM with Linux Kernel 3.2 and QEMU 1.4
  XEN 4.0 and higher for User Domain (domU)
Event-Based Sampling and Sampling with stacks data collection is functional
inside a Virtual machine only for architectural events.

If guest OS on your VM can not use EBS, you may use basic-hotspots, or perf utility (please see this article to know How-to in detail)

[Liyang_X_]

It seems like ESXi 6.0  + Guest OS: Linux not support EBS. So is it the reason that causes VM hang-up?

[Peter_W_Intel]

I haven't tested ESXi 6.0 if there is an unexpected result when running EBS, please run vtune_amplifier_xe_2016/sepdk/src/rmmod-sep3 to remove drivers. Then run driver-less EBS as I posted last time.