Explain Ballooning according to my scenario

[gerf0727]

Hello,

Can you guys explain me a little bit values related to Memory, i know we have documentation but it is hard to digest. (Seescreenshot)

I have a VM with 2 vCPU and 4GB of vRAM

I have set Resources on Memory by limiting it to 1024MB and after that I got the following error "High balloon memory utilization for UPIDSDWebTest has been changed to Error (previous state: Warning)"

Then I changed the limit to 3GB. Do not see the error but still ballooning.

In other words what is the purpose of Limiting ?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

In other words what is the purpose of Limiting ?

An example: Consider your boss wants to have a VM for his own use with 16GB memory. You assign 16GB memory to it (this is what the guest OS will see) but limit memory to 2GB (because you know he won't need 16GB anyway)

Seriously, I don't see a real use case for memory limits. What I could think of is an environment, where users are charged for physical memory usage, but need an option to dynamically increase it without downtime for the VM (i.e. the VM does not support hot-adding memory).

André

[gerf0727]

Hmmm, interesting Good example. And, what if you increase the limit to more than the given memory, let's say 6gb on my scenario which the VM has 4gb?

[weinstein5]

Andre excellent example - I could not think of one but yours is excellent - o to the original question - I never use limits -

[a_p_]

Easy question, you cannot set the limit to more than the provisioned amount of memory.

André