Memory sharing among guests?

[znmeb]

Suppose I have an ESX host with ten guests, all running Red Hat Linux. According to the documentation, ESX will figure out which pages of physical memory can be shared by more than one guest and share them. How can I measure this? Is there some list of the total number of physical pages and how they are allocated, some shared and some unique to a single guest? Is there some overall "memory map" for a host I can access?

[dmaster]

Just have a look at the performance tab in your VMware ESX host or VirtualCenter server.

press : change Chart Options and select memory-->Real-time

if you want you can select all types of memory measurements... but for your case you have to focus on Memory Shared and Memory Shared Common.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Outside of the method mentioned there is always esxtop (which will have limited information), but no there is no 'memory map' you can view.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[znmeb]

Ah ... that will tell me some of what I want to know. Can one determine how much "private" memory each guest is using, or is it only the totals?

[dmaster]

Hello znmeb,

you can also create a graph on an Virtual Machine Basis.

For this you have to got to the performance tab--> change chart options --> select "Stacked Graph (Per VM)"

and check or uncheck the checkboxes for the vm's running on the esx host.