Become a Virtualization Expert Series – Part 3 – Virtual Memory Management – Dynamic Memory Much Different than Memory Over Commit
Dan Stolts brings us the latest installment in our series where he breaks down the importance of dynamic memory, and then compares it to the way that other Hypervisors might perform similar functions.
His comments on ballooning I don’t necessarily agree with fully(except for from a security perspective which I think was his main point). Ballooning maybe ok in some cases where you have tremendous disk speed but disk speed comes at a high premium and is not a resource I like to allocate toward something that could be fixed with proper configuration of the virtual environment. All in all, just stay away from paging, ballooning, and swapping if at all possible or you will eventually find yourself at the bad end of help desk ticket. I wrote an article on the topic some time ago, which can be found here:
In this article I show the questions we should be asking ourselves or our VMware admins. Part II gets into the next steps of the process.
