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Leica
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VMWare Workstation - Memory Technology Question

Hi,

ESXi uses advanced memory technologies like Ballooning, Deduplication and Compression.

I am curious, does Workstation (or Fusion) use any of them?

Thanks.

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

The only I believe it uses is balloning - it really cannot do the others because the host O/S will have control over the physical memory

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Leica
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have been searching the web, trying to find an answer.

What I found is a PDF about version 7.0 of Workstation:-

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ws7_performance.pdf

On page 19, it says:-

"Workstation 7.0 uses three memory management mechanisms, page sharing, ballooning, and swapping, to dynamically reduce the amount of machine physical memory required for each virtual machine."

And this is for version 7.0, so maybe by version 9.0 it uses all the technologies of ESXi? I wonder if they use the same basic engine. It would be nice to know. Maybe someone here from VMWare can clarify...

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

The virtualization engine is the same.  However, most of these technologies are implemented in the platform (i.e. the vmkernel).  Ballooning is implemented primarily in the guest, so it is available on all platforms.

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