First try cleaning up the server as outlined below. The Guest Mem % you are seeing can be mis-leading and will change over time based on memory saving techniques ESX uses. See these links for more info...
Host Mem and Guest Mem % - http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=620581򗠥
http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=517737
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=62628&tstart=0
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=620581򗠥
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=607837򔙝
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=618634򗂊
Memory Resource Management in VMWare ESX Server - http://www.stanford.edu/~stinson/cs240/cs240_1/revs/esx.txt
The Role of Memory in ESX Server 3 - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_memory.pdf
Memory resource management in Vmware ESX Server - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/usenix_resource_mgmt.pdf
Why does my VM show a high Guest Mem %?
• This is common when a virtual machine first boots. Windows zeroes the contents of all pages in physical memory while booting. This causes the system to become overcommitted almost immediately, as each VM accesses all of its memory. Since the Windows balloon drivers are not started until late in the boot sequence, ESX Server is forced to start paging to disk. Soon after booting the amount of shared memory drops rapidly, and ESX Server compensates by using ballooning to reclaim memory. Page sharing continues to exploit sharing opportunities over time saving additional memory.
• See this white paper for more on this… http://www.vmware.com/pdf/usenix_resource_mgmt.pdf
What should I do after I successfully convert my virtual machine?
If you change from a multi-processor system to a uni-processor system you need to manually change the HAL on the Windows server after the conversion. To do this go into Device Manager after the machine first boots and discovers it's new hardware and then click on Computer then right-click on the processor and select Update Driver. Then select Install from specific location and then Don't search I will choose the driver to install. Then select show All compatible hardware and select the appropriate processor. For example, if you went from a dual cpu to a single cpu then select ACPI uni-processor PC instead of ACPI multi-processor PC. You will need to reboot once you change this. To verify what HAL you are using you right-click your hal.dll in c:\windows\system32 and select the Version tab and select Internal Name and it should say halmacpi.dll for multi-processor acpi and halacpi.dll for uni-processor acpi.
Next clean up all the non-present hardware after the P2V conversion. To do this go to a CMD prompt and type SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 and then DEVMGMT.MSC and then select Show Hidden Devices. Delete any old grayed out hardware.
Next remove any vendor specific applications/drivers. For example on a HP server you should go to Add/Remove programs and remove any HP management agents, survey utility, array config utility, version control agent, etc. Also check your NIC and make sure there are no vendor specific drivers there (ie. teaming). Check the Services to see if all there is anything vendor specific related there and disable any services that are.
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Thanks, Eric
Visit my website: http://vmware-land.com
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