6.5.1

Table Of Contents
Table 114. Memory Performance Enhancement Advice
# Resolution
1 Verify that VMware Tools is installed on each virtual machine.
2 Verify that the balloon driver is enabled. The balloon driver is installed with VMware Tools and is critical to
performance. The VMkernel regularly reclaims unused virtual machine memory by ballooning and swapping.
Generally, it does not impact virtual machine performance.
3 If the balloon value is high, check the resource shares, reservations, and limits for the virtual machines and resource
pools on the hosts. Verify that the host's seings are adequate and not lower than those set for the virtual machine.
If free memory is available on the hosts and the virtual machines are experiencing high swap or balloon memory,
the virtual machine (or resource pool, if it belongs to one) has reached its resource limit. Check the maximum
resource limit set on that host.
4 If the cluster is not a DRS cluster, enable DRS. To enable DRS, perform the following tasks:
1 Select the cluster, and click the  tab.
2 Under Services, click vSphere DRS.
3 click Edit.
An Edit Cluster Seings dialog box opens.
4 Click Turn ON vSphere DRS, and click OK.
5 If the cluster is a DRS cluster:
n
Increase the number of hosts, and migrate one or more virtual machines to the new host.
n
Check the aggressiveness threshold. If the value is low, increase the threshold. It might help avoid hot spots in
the cluster.
6 Add more physical memory to one or more hosts.
Memory (MB)
The Memory (MB) chart displays memory data counters for clusters. The chart appears at all collection
levels except level 1.
Description
This chart is located in the Home view of the cluster Performance tab.
N These data counter denitions are for hosts. At the cluster level, the values are collected and totaled.
The counter values in the chart represent the aggregate amounts of the host data. The counters that appear
in the chart depend on the collection level set for your vCenter Server.
Table 115. Data Counters
Chart Label Description
Active Sum of the active guest physical memory of all powered on virtual machines on the
host, plus memory used by basic VMkernel applications. Active memory is estimated
by the VMkernel.
n
Counter: active
n
Stats Type: Absolute
n
Unit: Megabytes (MB)
n
Rollup Type: Average (Minimum/Maximum)
n
Collection Level: 2 (4)
Balloon Sum of the guest physical memory reclaimed by the balloon driver for all powered
on virtual machines on the host.
n
Counter: vmmemctl
n
Stats Type: Absolute
n
Unit: Megabytes (MB)
n
Rollup Type: Average (Minimum/Maximum)
n
Collection Level: 1 (4)
vSphere Monitoring and Performance
18 VMware, Inc.