Hello
I am running into an issue where users are complaining about memory swapping on their virtual machines. I can see swapping occur inside the guest but I dont see any reports of it via vcenter. Currently we are using a kernel that requires a patch to get it fully working. Could that explain why I am not seeing what the guest are seeing?
With the swapping users are complaining of high I/O wait time as well. However I am having a hard time pin pointing where the problem is.
There is no latency to the SAN, davg/wr is right around 1.0 and guest memory useage reported via vcenter is hovering around %30.
Example:
guest (3GB):
vcenter:
3.06 GB consumed
1.35 Active
0 swapped
Any ideas would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Ty[ically if swapping is occurring inside the guestis an indication on one of two things occuring -
Other than looking at vcenter how do I monitor balloon activity? Because right now its not reporting any.
you would be able to set an alarm within vcenter to send an email if balloning occcurs - you could also monitor the vmware tools activity within the VM itself since VMware tools is where the Balloon driver is installed -
But back to your original question without balloon activity it sounds like there is not enough memory assigned to the VM -
Just to add to what weinstein5 has said the swap counter in vCenter does not reprsent the same swap that you see inside a guest OS. The swap in vCenter is monitoring vSphere swapping while inside the guest OS monitors OS swapping.