Veeam Monitor and RAM Useage

[anderwd]

I have installed and have been experimenting with the free Veeam Monitor to keep an eye on my ESX 3.5 server. It hasbeen telling me that the ESX memory useage is over 75%. Is there a cut off where I should add more RAM, or is 75% an acceptable threshold?

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

You know better your workload. If there is no unpredictable spikes and you're not going to add a lot of VMs in near future then all is ok.

Check swap and balloning for VMs. There is not enough memory when balloon > 0, but in some cases it is still acceptable. All depends on workload.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[anderwd]

Hate to be a total noob, but whats balloning and how would I check it?

[anderwd]

Sorry - just indicated my noobness by asking before looking! When I look at the VIC performance tabs, the Average balloon is 0, Swap in 50020, Swap out 50516

[anderwd]

Looking at the past day for a single VM - the balloon is the same - 0 - however I do notice a ginormus spike that seems to occure every day at 10pm.

[AntonVZhbankov]

Take a look at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_memory.pdf

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[anderwd]

I have been reading and looking at this and still cannot seem to

figure it out. I am getting my Host ESX OS telling me via the VIC

performance monitor, and Veeam emails that the server is using 85 - 90

% of the RAM. So I look at the VM's and none of them are showing more

than 25% Max usage with averages running around 5 - 7 % but the host

still says it is 85-90. So I look at ESXTop

1:57:32pm up 244 days  1:57, 70 worlds; MEM overcommit avg: 0.12, 0.12, 0.12

PMEM  /MB:  8190   total:   272     cos,   212 vmk,    6565 other,

1140 free  VMKMEM/MB:  7780 managed:   466 minfree,  4523 rsvd,   3132

ursvd,  high state

COSMEM/MB:    57    free:   541  swap_t,   416 swap_f:   0.00 r/s,   0.00 w/s

PSHARE/MB:  2923  shared,   990  common:  1933 saving

SWAP  /MB:     0    curr,     0  target:                 0.00 r/s,   0.00 w/s

MEMCTL/MB:     0    curr,     0  target,  5431 max

   GID NAME             NWLD    MEMSZ    SZTGT     TCHD %ACTV %ACTVS %ACTVF %A

    15 vmware-vmkauthd     1     5.62     5.62     1.93     0      0      0

    31 SVMNDC2             8  4004.00  3623.73   200.20     4      2      4

    32 SVMNEX1             5  2080.00  1645.17    41.60     2      1      2

    33 SVMNICA2            6  2272.00  1669.80   181.76     0      1      0

And I cannot see in there what is using the RAM, evn looking at plain old top:

14:00:14 up 244 days, 2:00, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.02

121 processes: 118 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped

CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle

total 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.4% 99.6%

Mem: 268568k av, 209700k used, 58868k free, 0k shrd, 32828k buff

150436k actv, 25940k in_d, 2796k in_c

Swap: 554168k av, 128024k used, 426144k free 50460k cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND

1 root 15 0 496 460 436 S 0.0 0.1 0:04 0 init

2 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 keventd

3 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 ksoftirqd/0

6 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 bdflush

4 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:01 0 kswapd

5 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kscand

7 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kupdated

19 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 1:05 0 vmkmsgd

20 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 vmnixhbd

I can see that the RAM used, but not by what - my severs seem kind of

idle. Any thoughts of something to look at?

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 11:00 AM, AntonVZhbankov