Balloon driver unnecessarily inflating after deploying VM from template

[jparnell]

Hi.

We're having a problem with deploying new virtual machines from a Windows 2003 template we have. The template is functioning perfectly fine and expected. However when we deploy a new virtual machine from this template, the balloon driver in the new virtual machine inflates even though there is no contention and plenty of available RAM in the ESXi server. The amount of memory the balloon driver consumes eventually returns to zero, but users are complaining about poor performance of the virtual machine.

I have tried deploying several virtual machines but all have the same problem. We are running ESXi 3.5 and vCenter 2.5 U3. Any advice would be great.

Thanks,

James

[bradley4681]

I believe this is the normal right after deployment, atleast when I tryed it here. It always returns to normal after a few minutes, why are users on the guest so quickly after deployment?

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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[RParker]

It always returns to normal after a few minutes, why are users on the guest so quickly after deployment?

Are you kidding? We have users that are bringing up their RDP login and attempting to login even before the VM is finished.... When people want a VM they want it yesterday in our environment. Same thing happens when I tell them maintenance is being done. I have to reboot a few times, and in between I have to kick people off and send out an email or two reminding them that I haven't notified it's ok to log back in!

[jparnell]

It happens to the virtual machine every time I reboot it - not just the first time it boots up after being deployed. Our other virtual machines don't do it, and like I said it causes real performance problems for the users. I can't ask them to wait for an hour whilst it gradually returns to zero.