Memory Ballooning issue

[Pollard]

For some reason my virtual machines are ballooning memory which I never saw on my other hypervisor. And it seems to be slowing down the virtual machines what the best way to resolve this set the hardware memory lower than the max? In each virtual machine the show used memory in the taskmanager is more than all the processes added up to. Its ballooning memory even before its all used.

I set the hardware memory 5852 instead of 8192 I originally set it to and it dropped to 0 once I rebooted.

Example used memory is 1gb shown is 5.4gb

[MattiasN81]

Simple answer to why you VMs are balooning is that you have overcommited.

When ESXi is short on physical memory it will start to reclaim "inactive" memory on VMs and release it to other VMs when needed.

[Pollard]

There's only 2 server 08 r2 sp1 virtual machines and there hardly using any memory. How do you get it to release the memory? After awhile the second machine balloons up for no apparent reason.

Server has 8gb of ram

VM1

Host Memory

3.60GB Consumed of 6116MB

Guest

1.07GB Active

Balloon is 2219936kb and not releasing

VM2

Host Memory

1.88 Consumed of 5852Mb

Guest

1.03GB Active

Ballon was 3894816kb rebooted and it released it sitting at 0

[Pollard]

Why does the total memory capacity not match? I set the max memory to 4GB and now the virtual machines aren't slow what is causing this?

[MattiasN81]

How much RAM does your host have ?

[Pollard]

Its has 8gb I am going to get another 8gb