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ESXi virtual machines can incur two kinds of memory overhead.
n
The additional time to access memory within a virtual machine.
n
The extra space needed by the ESXi host for its own code and data structures, beyond the memory
allocated to each virtual machine.
ESXi memory virtualization adds little time overhead to memory accesses. Because the processor's
paging hardware uses page tables (shadow page tables for software-based approach or two level page
tables for hardware-assisted approach) directly, most memory accesses in the virtual machine can
execute without address translation overhead.
The memory space overhead has two components.
n
A fixed, system-wide overhead for the VMkernel.
n
Additional overhead for each virtual machine.
Overhead memory includes space reserved for the virtual machine frame buffer and various virtualization
data structures, such as shadow page tables. Overhead memory depends on the number of virtual CPUs
and the configured memory for the guest operating system.
Overhead Memory on Virtual Machines
Virtual machines require a certain amount of available overhead memory to power on. You should be
aware of the amount of this overhead.
The following table lists the amount of overhead memory a virtual machine requires to power on. After a
virtual machine is running, the amount of overhead memory it uses might differ from the amount listed in
the table. The sample values were collected with VMX swap enabled and hardware MMU enabled for the
virtual machine. (VMX swap is enabled by default.)
Note The table provides a sample of overhead memory values and does not attempt to provide
information about all possible configurations. You can configure a virtual machine to have up to 64 virtual
CPUs, depending on the number of licensed CPUs on the host and the number of CPUs that the guest
operating system supports.
Table 61. Sample Overhead Memory on Virtual Machines
Memory (MB) 1 VCPU 2 VCPUs 4 VCPUs 8 VCPUs
256 20.29 24.28 32.23 48.16
1024 25.90 29.91 37.86 53.82
4096 48.64 52.72 60.67 76.78
16384 139.62 143.98 151.93 168.60
vSphere Resource Management
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