VMware Cloud Community
godbucket
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Host memory swap, balloon, and compression high WITH vmtools installed

Just doesn't make any sense. Over the weekend we upgraded several hosts from 5.1 to 5.5 U3. Done this (literally) hundreds of times. As soon as they all came online and started hosting VM's, memory red-lined on every host. Balloon, swap in/out, and compression metrics are through the roof.

Now for the really weird part (before everyone starts rolling their eyes).... VMware Tools IS installed on every single VM.

Anyone have any ideas?

SAN latency is fine, as always. Network util is very low, as usual. No other changes to the environment whatsoever.

Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts, or if I missed some overnight critical patch or something.

Reply
0 Kudos
1 Reply
JarryG
Expert
Expert

5.5 is using more host-RAM than 5.1 for itself (for hypervisor), so there remains less for VMs. Maybe you crossed the limit.

This happened to me too when I upgraded from 5.1 to 6.0: suddenly I was over-committing host-RAM and swapping/ballooning kicked in (which I never observed with 5.1). I re-configured all VMs with ~200MB vRAM less and everything returned to normal...

_____________________________________________ If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! 😉
Reply
0 Kudos