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Table Of Contents
The VMM for each virtual machine maintains a mapping from the guest operating system's physical
memory pages to the physical memory pages on the underlying machine. (VMware refers to the
underlying host physical pages as “machine” pages and the guest operating system’s physical pages as
“physical” pages.)
Each virtual machine sees a contiguous, zero-based, addressable physical memory space. The
underlying machine memory on the server used by each virtual machine is not necessarily contiguous.
The guest virtual to guest physical addresses are managed by the guest operating system. The
hypervisor is only responsible for translating the guest physical addresses to machine addresses.
Hardware-assisted memory virtualization utilizes the hardware facility to generate the combined mappings
with the guest's page tables and the nested page tables maintained by the hypervisor.
The diagram illustrates the ESXi implementation of memory virtualization.
Figure 51. ESXi Memory Mapping
virtual machine
1
guest virtual memory
guest physical memory
machine memory
a b
a
a b b c
b
c b
b c
virtual machine
2
n
The boxes represent pages, and the arrows show the different memory mappings.
n
The arrows from guest virtual memory to guest physical memory show the mapping maintained by
the page tables in the guest operating system. (The mapping from virtual memory to linear memory
for x86-architecture processors is not shown.)
n
The arrows from guest physical memory to machine memory show the mapping maintained by the
VMM.
n
The dashed arrows show the mapping from guest virtual memory to machine memory in the shadow
page tables also maintained by the VMM. The underlying processor running the virtual machine uses
the shadow page table mappings.
Hardware-Assisted Memory Virtualization
Some CPUs, such as AMD SVM-V and the Intel Xeon 5500 series, provide hardware support for memory
virtualization by using two layers of page tables.
Note In this topic, "Memory" can refer to physical RAM or Persistent Memory.
vSphere Resource Management
VMware, Inc. 31