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Svetlio
Contributor
Contributor

Problem with RAM usage on vmware esxi5.5

Hello,

I have a host ( ESXi 5.5 ) with 128G physical RAM. Current active memory is only 10G and 100G granted. The host have swap cache on the top of PCI-E SSD drive and CPU utilization is ~30%.

So I decided to add several additional VMs on the host. Now granted memory is 200G and swap is still unused, the active memory is 30G.

The following issue appears. The task manager of all of VMs shows 80% RAM usage without running any processes on them. Also the sum of RAM usage of all running processes is less than 5% of RAM granted to VM.

Memory reservation is set to 0

Do you have any idea what makes this machines to use so much memory without any reason ?

Regards!

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Madmax01
Expert
Expert

Hi theire,

So i just could mind 1 possible Reason for that.

Vmware changed TPS Feature to other Method called "Salting".

VMware KB: Additional Transparent Page Sharing management capabilities and new default settings

So maybe you have already the Salting Build and Facing bad Memory Sharing.

i personally sense the Security Problem which Vmware tested in theire Lab as very small, so i just use the old TPS instead of Salting to have good sharing again.

just if that is maybe the Case, could you check the Value out please

Which Value you have here in the Advanced-settings of 5.5 Hosts?

Mem.ShareForceSalting

thx

Max

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Svetlio
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

I`m not able to find such settings Mem.ShareForceSalting ( please refer to the screenshot attached ).

We also set memory limit = VM granted memory -> For example the VM has 4GB RAM, we put reservation=0 and limit=4096MB.

Regards!

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