No access to phisycal RAM, only swap file

[SrGroucho]

I'm having problems in an VSphere ESX4 + VCenter4.0 environment.

Every VM has a swap file with the total amount of memory assigned, and the phisycal memory has no utilization.

Even, if there are only one VM with 4GB RAM assigned in an hypervisor ESX4 with 32GB RAM, the whole memory is swaped to a file (.vswap). The only way to assign real RAM is to make a Reservation. Then the amount of reservation is pointed to RAM and the rest to the vswap.

The ESX4 are mounted over HP DL380/DL360 G5 and the Gest OS in not relevant.

Any ideas?

[oreeh · Accepted solution]

This is perfectly normal behavior.

Without a reservation a vswp file always get created (in case the balloon driver needs it).

However, that doesn't mean that memory actually is swapped out.

[beyondvm]

yes, as oreeh has said, this is normal. ESX creates these swap files on VM boot and they will be (configured guest ram ammount - memory reserved for guest = swap file size). These files do not get used unless the host runs out of memory but they are still created.

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