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SilentGuy
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ESXi 4.1 - Question regarding memory usage

Hi all,

I am currently in the process of migrating from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1.0 and while doing so of upgrading my hardware (3x HP DL380 G7, 24GB RAM, 2 Intel X5660 CPUs each).

The boxes are installed with ESXi 4.1.0 Build 384481 and hpq-esxi4.1uX-bundle-1.0a, hardware monitoring is done using HP SIM (V6, Windows).

What bothers me, though, is that VSphere Client (4.1.0 Build 345043) is reporting steadlily increasing memory usage on its summary tab. The increase varies by system, ranging from 98MB to 1848MB in the last 3 days, still growing.

Meanwhile the performance tab reports that memory consumed exceeds memory granted.

Has anybody seen this behaviour, too? Is this normal or am I facing a memory leak here?

Many thanks in advance.

Regards,

SilentGuy

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Cooldude09
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alright no worries. here is the jsutification which could come handy.

the reason to ask for the image is to understand the spikes over the various times and or prabably the pattern.

the 3rd party agents like one form HP could be one reason for these behaviour and this pumps memory when they collect logs. I believe this is on normal side as the utilization should normally not go beyong 2000 MB for a normal opertaing esxi without any VM's

I would suggest you to monitor for two more days and see if it still grows more...

hope this helps

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Cooldude09
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could you paste the screenshot of the performance tab...selecting memeory and week as the input data....

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SilentGuy
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Sorry,

those are (stil...) stand alone boxes, VSphere Client won't give me more than the last hour...

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Cooldude09
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alright no worries. here is the jsutification which could come handy.

the reason to ask for the image is to understand the spikes over the various times and or prabably the pattern.

the 3rd party agents like one form HP could be one reason for these behaviour and this pumps memory when they collect logs. I believe this is on normal side as the utilization should normally not go beyong 2000 MB for a normal opertaing esxi without any VM's

I would suggest you to monitor for two more days and see if it still grows more...

hope this helps

If U find my answer useful, feel free to give points by clicking Helpful or Correct.

Subscribe yourself at walkonblock.com

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idle-jam
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Another way is to download and install trial version of vcenter. That would allow you to perform a deeper study. Who knows if you like it you might want to buy it later 🙂

SilentGuy
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Thanks,

will do that. Just for clarification, the systems are not completely idle. They are running 4-5 VMs currently some Linux (CentOS) but mostly different flavours of Windows (ranging form W2K Server to Windows 7). Memory granted is still way below memory available on the boxes.

So I assume the memory usage will / should stop growing as soon as the sum of all memory granted to the VMS (incl. overhead) + ca. 2000 MB will be reached.

I will keep this thread open for some more days until I have collected more data.

Regards,

SilentGuy

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SilentGuy
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Well, that's an option. I will try this if memory consumption will not stop.

Thanks so far,

SilentGuy

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bulletprooffool
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Wihtout a VC, you could still use ESXTOp to gather info.

Have a look at LucD's scripts to do so from PowerCli:

http://www.lucd.info/2010/12/03/hitchhikers-guide-to-get-esxtop-part-1/

You could set long intervals and just run this on a remote host for a while - perhaps get it to log each interval to a CSV, then interrogate it as you choose?

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
SilentGuy
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Sounds interresting. Unfortunately I am not in the office today, I will have a closer look at this when I am back there and report back then.

Many thanks,

SilentGuy

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SilentGuy
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Short update.

I've been monitoring mem usage over the last few days. Memory usage seems (more or less) to have reached a peak, being now between 0.5 and 1 GB above the memory granted to all VMs currently running on these servers.

I will monitor this further until after the weekend and report back again.

Many thanks so far.

Regards,

SilentGuy

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