I am running ESXi 5.1. I do not have any custom reservations configured for Memory. I am running in "Sandy Bridge" EVC mode.
I notice higher than expected consumed host memory on many of my guests. This example guest is running Server 2012 R2 with current VMware tools version running.
VMware reports
Guest OS reports
My understanding is that the "Standby" and "Modified" on the guest contains the "Cached" memory, and the guest "Cached" memory is the typical answer to this question that I see when people are onyl looking at the "In Use" memory. In my case, I am factoring in the cached memory, my guest shows 3805 MB of truely free memory, yet my host shows 7.68 GB of host memory consumed, with only 68MB of overhead consumption.By my calculations, the VM should only be consuming about 4.28GB of memory.
Message was edited by: bradduane Replaced text values with screenshots.