Hi,
We are using esx 4.0 build 164009 on some Dell R710 servers, with the Nehalem processors. The problem we are experiencing is that the Active Guest Memory for VM's is reported incorrectly when checked within the VM. This also effect the Memory Usage on the ESX server, so we are nog sure if the server is really using all this memory or that this is reported incorrectly as well.
We are running 9 VM's on one of our hosts, and most of them report guest memory around 90%. One of the VM's (as an example) is reporting the following:
So the Consumed Host Memory is 4175 MB, while the Guest Mem - % value is 97%.
If we look inside the VM's, the Physical Memory is as follows:
Furthermore, if we look at the Consumed Host Memory for all VM's and add that up, we get near the amount of Memory Usage reported for the entire ESX server.
So we see two things that are strange to us.
First, we would expect the Memory usage value for the server to be all the values of Active Guest Memory combined plus a small overhead for ESX itself. If we do this for our server this would be a value of 19332 (excluding the ESX servers memory), while reported is 25075.
Second, we would expect the amount of memory reported as Active Guest Memory for our VM's to be in the vicinity of the total amount of memory minus the free memory reported within the OS.
So is this just false reporting, or does the amount of memory used for the esx server, really include all the free memory reported in the VM's. Normally, we would dare to overcommit assigned memory, as long as there was enough free memory available, however this way we don't.
We have looked at this thread and I see some similarities: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/211585
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Ronald
