Installation guide

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VMware ESX Server Administration Guide
Memory
• Memory Savings Due to Sharing — amount of memory saved by sharing
memory between virtual machines
Many VMware ESX Server workloads present opportunities for sharing memory
across virtual machines. For example, several VMs may be running instances of
the same guest operating system, have the same applications or components
loaded, or contain common data. In such cases, VMware ESX Server uses a
proprietary transparent page sharing technique to securely eliminate redundant
copies of memory pages. With memory sharing, a workload running as virtual
machines often consumes less memory than it would when running on physical
machines. As a result, higher levels of overcommitment can be supported
efficiently.
System Summary: Reserved Memory
This chart shows the current allocation of reserved memory and swap space on the
server:
RAM
• Reserved — memory committed for guaranteed allocations to existing virtual
machines
• Unreserved — uncommitted memory available for guaranteed allocations to
power on new virtual machines
• Total — total reserved and unreserved RAM memory
Swap
• Reserved — system swap file space committed for existing virtual machines
• Unreserved — total unreserved swap file space currently available to be used by
virtual machines
• Total — total reserved and unreserved space in system swap files
Memory
• Memory Available to Power On a Virtual Machine — maximum memory size
that can be specified when powering on the next single- or dual-processor
virtual machine
Virtual Machines: Virtual Machine Summary
For each running virtual machine, this chart shows a breakdown of the virtual
machine's memory allocation: