ESX 3.5u4 (12x core, 32GB)
11x guests RHEL 5.2 64bit all given 8GB of ram
Balloon driver and swapping is kicking in across multiple ESX hosts, across multiple guests but I don't appear to have host memory contention.
i.e. outputs from memory of the performance tab for one of the hosts
Balloon: 20069088
Consumed: 16376120
Active: 7710020
Shared Common: 850572
Granted: 17663128
Swp Used: 9067512
Output from esxtop
PMEM /MB: 32766 total: 272 cos, 432 vmk, 15158 other, 16903 free
VMKMEM/MB: 32060 managed: 1923 minfree, 5394 rsvd, 26466 ursvd, high state
COSMEM/MB: 7 free: 541 swap_t, 435 swap_f: 0.00 r/s, 0.00 w/s
NUMA /MB: 1 6071 ( 8077), 16189 ( 8826)
PSHARE/MB: 3796 shared, 831 common: 2965 saving
SWAP /MB: 8917 curr, 5040 target: 0.00 r/s, 0.00 w/s
MEMCTL/MB: 18923 curr, 18923 target, 55354 max
HA is enabled
1033 slots in cluster, 68 used, 871 slots available
Some of the guests have a memory resource limit set to the size of ram of the guest (normally we have them set to unlimited) but no reservation is set. Whether this limit is set doesn't seem to change whether or not a guest is swapping out their ram.
Yes the 8GB per guest is way overkill (way, way), I'm walking into this one a bit blind so I don't know exactly the details behind why they did it but I'm needing to know why when the host says only 16GB of ram consumed (only 7gb active) on a 32GB host it is swapping out memory
