See which guests that are swapping?

[kalleandersson]

Hi guys,

Is it possible to see which guest VMs that are swapping?

The environment is about 150 guests with each 512 MB - 4 GB ram and we're using ESX 3.5 build 98103 on the hosts.

Do I need to check on each guest or can it be seen from the hosts / the cluster?

Thanks in advance for any tips or ideas.

/Kalle

[weinstein5]

When you say swapping - are referring to the vm's own guest o/s virtual memory or to the per vm vmkernel swap file? - if you are talking about the guest o/s swap file than no you will have to look at each vm individually - if it is the per vm vmkernel swap file - this is memory of last resort so the vm's should already have alarms for memory and the other indication is the perfomance of the vm will be poor -

[kalleandersson]

OK, thanks! I was referring to the guests own memory management.

[MetronAthenePhi]

Well theres the traditional way and use a product that an interrogate the VM's OS.

cough Metron Athene will do this...

Or your going to have to think laterally. If you think the ESX hosts are short of memory you could try monitoring the Vmmemctl statistics available in Virtual Center and see if the balloon driver is taking lots of memory from VMs.

I guess you could create a seperate disk file for the VMs Swap file and use Virtual Center to monitor the free space of that "swap" disk. But thats a lot of messing around.

If they are VMs running windows I would suggest using perfmon to capture logs of the swap performance statistics if this is a one off exersize.

However if this is a large estate and you need to produce regular performance reports then you really need to invest in a proper performance reprting/capacity management tool.