Older OSes ballooning on vSphere 5

[kcarlile]

Hi,

I've just built a new vSphere 5 cluster and am in the process of migrating my VMs from vSphere 4. The new cluster consists of 3 Dell R910 servers with 256GB of RAM each. Currently, there are about 30 VMs running across the 3 of these, with 2-4 GB of RAM allocated to them, on average (OK, there's one with 48 GB and one with 20, but on AVERAGE...)

Each host is showing between 7-12% of the memory in use.

Here's the problem: all of the RHEL3 and Windows Server 2003 VMs are are ballooning their memory--some are even swapping!

These machines are not in a resource pool, and all have the latest VMware Tools and HW version. The hosts are fully up to date per Update Manager.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm stopping the migration until I have this nailed down.

Thanks,

Ken

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

There are some limits in the Resource tab of each VM?

[kcarlile]

Thank you very much!

Turns out whoever set these puppies up before me had in fact set limits on the memory for many of the VMs (found it on the old cluster, too). Fixed, now it's just a matter of waiting for the balloons to deflate. Hopefully.