Memory Allocation

BDMcGrewVM · ‎12-08-2010

Hello All!

I'm sure this question has been asked more times than one can count, but, I can't seem to find the answer so please excuse me if it's a blatant duplication and feel free to point me in the right direction.

I'm running ESXi 4 on a server with 13GB of RAM and 7 VM's. Each VM is allocated 2GB of RAM. Yes I'm over-allocating, but it's a test environment. All of my VM's are very much idle. However, the Host Memory vs. Guest Memory usages are wildly different. The Host Memory is 75% or more on each VM, while the guest memory is quite low on each VM (they are, after all, idle).

See the attached picture to be exact.

What am I missing here? Why is the host memory so high and guest so low? As opposed to being much closer together? I need to deploy a few more VM's for the testing I'm doing, but clearly, with only 13GB of RAM, I'm running out of memory quickly!

Thanks,

-brian

logiboy123 · ‎12-08-2010

Host Mem - MB

This is the amount of physical RAM a VM is currently using on the ESX host. This will vary based on ESX's memory saving techniques and the amount of memory usage by the VM.

Guest Mem - %

This is the total percentage of memory that a VM is using based on its total memory. So if a VM has 1GB of memory and is only using 256MB then it would be 25%.