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5 Replies Last post: May 28, 2009 5:15 AM by hennish  

VMs using ESX swap file, dispite ESX having free RAM posted: May 28, 2009 3:42 AM

Click to view hennish's profile Enthusiast 36 posts since
Sep 15, 2007

Hi. I'm getting a lot of warnings from my vFoglight monitoring tool, such as:

"The Memory Control Driver for virtual machine <VM name> will not deflate. The VM is unable to reclaim memory that is allocated to it. Add more physical resources to the server or use VMotion to move the VM to better balance utilization across servers in the cluster."

"The Memory Control Driver for server <host server> is not able to deflate the balloon for its virtual machines. Add more physical memory to the server or use VMotion to better balance utilization across servers in cluster. This rule checks for servers working really hard to reclaim memory. Add more physical resources to the server or use VMotion to better balance utilization across servers in the cluster."

"VM has moved virtual machine memory from physical pages to the VMWare swap file within ESX. This may adversely affect performance on this VM."

Virtual Center's performance graphs show that the ESX server(s) in question are in fact using between 100-150 MBs of swap memory, and vFoglight does show that the VM(s) in question are using between 50 and 100 MBs of swap memory. This is dispite the fact that the ESX servers are only using between 25 and 40 % of their RAM.

Balooning seems to be at zero everywhere.

Any ideas?


Click to view depping's profile Champion 2,997 posts since
Jan 17, 2005
You might want to check the virtual machines on "limits". If a limit is set on memory it will either swap or balloon.

Duncan
VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX


Blogging: http://www.yellow-bricks.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/depping

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Click to view wila's profile Virtuoso 3,266 posts since
Jun 27, 2006
Hi,

Read the memory management series from Arnim van Lieshout for a better understanding so that you can troubleshoot properly.

http://www.van-lieshout.com/2009/04/esx-memory-management-part-1/

http://www.van-lieshout.com/2009/05/esx-memory-management-part-2/



--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
Visit the VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com
Click to view depping's profile Champion 2,997 posts since
Jan 17, 2005
Possible resource pools limitation? if that's not the case I suspect thaf vFoglight is giving you the wrong information. You could always use ESXTOP of vCenter to see if any swapping is going on.

Duncan
VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX


Blogging: http://www.yellow-bricks.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/depping

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

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