Hi,
We running ESX3.0.1 and we see very strange behaviour of Linux guest
We are running Redhat4 u4 32 Bits on most of our VM. We have seen strange behaviour with some of them.
Ex: We have reserved for one VM 2GB of Mem required by application.
First we saw that some application are using memory page from other VM "Balloon driver".So to avoid this, we set all VM to RES VM = LIMIT on ESX
The problem we have is that Lunix start OOM killer, to go to Panic state from to time to time.Also we saw that guest is not using swap device to free up some mem.
root@server]# free -mt
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2027 2010 7 0 7 135
-/+ buffers/cache: 1497 529
Swap: 2000 0 2000[/b]
Total: 4027 1640 2387
We want to use swap device and avoid balloon driver taking memory from other VM so
Question:
1) We have seen that Balloon driver impact other server, when memory are requested from other VM. We have then decided to Disable Balloon driver, by setting RESV MEM=LIMIT MEM is that correct ?
It look like no, because we have seen vmmemctl driver taking a lot of CPU and have monitored using esxtop the MCTLSZ MCTLTGT MCTLMAX params:
MCTLSZ MCTLTGT MCTLMAX
1317.75 1317.75 1317.75
2) Why Swap device is not used
3) How to disable Balloon driver, without stopping VMTOOLS, because we need it for NTP sync ?
