High Host Memory usage

[sdotsen]

I have a host with 14gb of RAM. I have 3 VMs running on it, right now they are idle (we dont have anything running on them yet).

I logged into the VirtualCenter client and when I view the summary for each VM, I see the host memory usage varies.

My one VM says 2.73gb, the other states 1.7 while the other one 1.6gb. Any idea as to what it means? BTW, the guest memory usage are well under 100MB.

[gary1012]

The Service Console requires some space (272MB to 800MB) and each VM has a small memory overhead requirement. The way to get full detail about memory usage is to use esxtop on the service console. Have you done that? If not, try this link for more details on esxtop.

[kjb007]

The host memory usage for a guest is how much memory the host is currently using to support the vm including overhead.

When a vm requests memory, ESX provides memory. When a vm stops using that memory, it does not tell ESX that it is not using that memory, it just stops using since it believes itself to be physical. So, the host memory usage can be as high as the allocated RAM for a vm, plus an additional amount for overhead.

Guest memory usage is how much memory the guest is actively using at the time the reading was taken.

-KjB