balloon pilot

Similar Questions

• The guest with the balloon pilot can inflate itself?

  The guest with the balloon pilot can inflate itself?

  as the topic.

  Yes, everything you said is true. With technical virtualization inplace, we always try to approve it at 1.5 x or 2 x take an example that will make this much clearer scenario.

  As you have a host with 8 GB of memory and you have turned on on four virtual machines each with 4 GB which is overcommitment of X 2. To achieve this level of overcommitment VMkernel uses now several technique of reclaimation of Page like:

  Page sharing

  Balloon flight

  Compression

  and Exchange.

  There may be a case when high memory pressure is VM1 and VM2 is lightly loaded, in this case balloon pilot will inflate in VM2 and pass the memory address to VMkernel which in turn pass these addresses at VM1. Don't forget THAT VM is completely uinaware in all these transition. Once the need has been filled the balloon VM2 pilot deflate and recover his memory.

  Please note that the balloon pilot is nothing but a program that uses the system call named Malloc() to reserve memory.

• Help understanding balloon pilot

  Hello

  Trying to wrap your head around the Vmware balloon pilot. I think I understand, but hoping someone here can confirm or put me in the right direction. We had a problem of performance recently, which turned out be a storage problem, but the use of memory on our guests have caught my attention.

  We have a cluster with eight (8) ESXi 4.0 U2 guest - dual Xeon 6 core procs with 72 GB of memory each. 32 Win 2 k 3 customers spread evenly between hosts (4) each configured to use 20GB memory, but on average only use 15-17GB. No reserve on the set of CPU or memory. Standards equal overall of all guests. Use of memory on the host computers are consistenly below the physical memory on the server.

  Once turned on the consistenly guests have 15-17 GB of memory that are assigned, even if on operating times more low Windows reports only by using 2.5 GB of memory. During periods of use lowest Vmware brings about active memory 1 GB, but 15-17 GB is always attributed to each guest.

  Now, my understanding of the pilot balloon is that until there are conflicts of resources, it calls, which is why we are seeing only the 15-17 GB of memory always allocated for the guests and it never goes down - because we never run out of physical resources. If I run performace reports/charts, the ball of memory always show 0 on all the guests.

  I understand the balloon pilot? Given the configuration, are allocations of memory of guests act properly. And could / should I think of other ways to optimize performance in the environment?

  Thanks in advance.

  -Adam

  I think you have a good understanding of the use of scenarios for the balloon pilot.  For me, your environment seems to be installed, at least from a perspective of resources VM, much like ours.  We didn't put no limit and not to use any resources, other than the DRS pools.

• Question about the balloon pilot

  Hello

  I have a question about the balloon pilot in ESX/ESXi 4.x. When the pilot is "inflated" the reason is to reveal to the ESX host memory of comments in fact is not used and that memory could be recovered by the host. However, the driver must be loaded all the time for this memory to be used by the host, as in giving him another VM?

  Or is it just inflate and deflate so and there is no need to stay charged?

  Once that memory has been retrieved the pilot deflates on its own.

• Balloon pilot underway to run with a lot of available memory - looking for answers as to why.

  I have a couple of ESX servers that are running Active balloon pilot, but there seems to be a lot of available memory to support current workloads. VC watching one of these ESX servers in the Summary tab memory use displays 14,08 GB of memory used out of 32 GB. When we look at ESXTOP = MEMCTL (Mo): 437 curr, target 437, max 10649. It seems that the balloon pilot has reached its target and I expect that he finish and stop the execution. NO VM have limits configuration for their use of resources, is not using pools of resources.  I'm just curious as to why these servers are showing a ball activity while the other ESX servers with much more demanding workloads are not... Thank you

  What vesrion ESX? 3.5 has a reported bug.

  Have you seen verified that the "unlimited" tab to the memory resource is checked for the customers in question?

  AWo
  VCP / VMware vEXPERT 2009

  = Due to a lack of employees, human beings humans are working here. -Treat it with care, they are rare. =

• disable the balloon pilot

  Hello

  We'll be the citrix server virtualization.  I had read a lot of articles & they say all "disable the balloon pilot during installation vmtools" during the installation of girl I can't find something to do with a balloon pilot.  I found something else that says that you must disable this through the VI client & gt; guest operating system etc, but it is for the host.

  is it possible to do this thinking the VM tools so that it only disables the balloon on the VM?

  Thank you

  Strongly, I agree with the above two posts and do not recommend disabling the balloon on any virtual machine pilot! But if you are here is the procedure to do so.

  :

  Connect directly to the ESX Server host computer where the virtual machine resides on, using Virtual Infrastructure Client (VI Client).

  -Stop the virtual machine.

  -Right-click on the virtual machine on the inventory Panel, then click on change settings.

  -Click on the Options tab, and then select general.

  -Click on the Configuration settings.

  -Click Add a line, and then add the sched.mem.maxmemctl setting in the text box.

  -Click on the line next to it and add a 0 in the text box.

  -Click OK to save the changes.

  If this answer was helpful please consider rewarding points.

• When ESX deflates pilot balloon?

  At some point on one of my hosts (likely when another host in the cluster was in maintenance mode), there was conflict of memory on the host, and it invoked the balloon pilot on one of my virtual machines.  OK, understood.  However, I am trying to get an understanding when the ball should 'deflate '.

  The host is now in condition zero pretension, but the balloon in the VM pilot remains inflated.  The ball deflate only when the virtual machine requires that memory back?  I understand the need for the balloon pilot and it makes sense when it is used, but I don't like the fact that it remains active for a long time once the claim has been removed (possibly causing the BONES of the VM Swap locally?)  Oh and I have no reservations, no limits, no pool of resources.

  Either by the way, I've migrated virtual machine to a new host and the ball stopped and is not replicated to (so far...)

  Here is an excerpt of the esxtop before I migrated virtual machine.

  16:09:08 up to 27 days 14:45, 311 worlds; MEM approve avg: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

  MMTP /MB: 65525 total: 1359 vmk, 51896 others, 12269 free

  VMKMEM/MB: 64475 managed: 3868 minfree, 8143 rsvd, 56332 ursvd State

  NUMA/MO: 32191 (7682), 32623 (6424)

  PSHARE/Mo: 4625 shared, common 1296: economy 3329

  SWAP /MB: 222 curr, 147 rclmtgt: r/s 0.00, 0.00 w/s

  / MO ZIP: 172 zipped, 115 saved

  MEMCTL/MB: 2662 curr, 2662 target, max 37239

  GID NAME MEMSZ GRANT SZTGT TCHD TCHD_W SWCUR SWTGT SWR/s SNT/s OVHDUW GEN OVHDMAX

  VMNORMAL1 1382063 8192,00 8191.05 8279,96 655.36 573,44 0.95 0.00 0.00 0.00 53.99 91,48 183.30
  

  VMNORMAL2 1744260 4096,00 4096.00 4115,46 204,80 163,84 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 37.80 64,50 135,35
  

  VMNORMAL3 1078435 4096,00 4096.00 4167,01 122.88 122,88 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 48.14 72,68 139.47
  

  2865 4096.00 VMBALLOON 1076.02 870,70 28.67 14.34 105.55 147,73 0.00 0.00 48.14 73,98 138.97

  Indeed, your proposal is correct - the balloon pilot does not "actively" return memory when the restraint condition ends - it waits until the VM must explicitly memory to do so.

  Migrate a virtual computer always requires the balloon pilot let go of his prey.

• Balloon VM pilot active without reason

  Hello

  I have a small group of 4 ESXi hosts. No of guests on resources committed (usually using 15 GB to 32 GB) I have a virtual machine that uses always the balloon pilot. Mater doesn't work if I restart it or move to another host after 10 minutes or if the driver comes into play. It runs the latest VMware tools

  Any ideas?

  Maybe you have a memory limit set on the machine and I forgot about it? This would make the kick balloon pilot in very early.

• Disable balloon and sharing memory

  We have a cluster with 5 5.1 ESXi hosts.  We want that there is no exchange of memory or the balloon.  We always made sure that our ESX host have a lot of RAM to accommodate what we attribute to our VM, so I think that we will take a performance hit if we were memory sharing/Exchange or swelling.

  In our test group, I noticed that even though we have more memory on our hosts that requires the virtual machine, it seems there is sharing of some courses.  I wasn't able to well find it in our production environment.  I want to just make sure we subscribe all memory we ascribe to our guests and they are not exchanging around when not in use.

  In the past, I found this option in the properties of the virtual machine on the 'resources' tab.  I think it's very good for CPU, a reservation is set to 0 but with unlimited box ticked.  For the record, I see 0 MB to as well, set of actions to normal, checked Unlimited.  I also see a checkbox for "reserve all the memory (everything locked).  I want to check this box to make sure there is no sharing?  I think that the balloon may be a different setting.

  Hello

  You can book all of the memory of the virtual computer and ESXi shares no memory of this virtual machine with an another VM.

  But if you want to disable the balloon, you must do so within each VM guest operating system because VMware tools includes balloon pilot.

  http://www.VMware.com/resources/TechResources/10206

  http://KB.VMware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalID=2017642

  He check above links for more information.

• VM Windows that all RAM stolen by pilot landlocked i.e. VMTools?

  I am running ESXi 5.5.0 on a single host. I discovered that a leak of 'memory' on my Windows 7 Enterprise VM resulted VMTools consume nearly all RAM like 'pilot-locked' I have had no limit memory or booking on the virtual machine. After uninstalling VMTools he could consume is more "unused" memory and performance is fantastic (flock of page file is no longer) however I now don't have VMTool feature on the virtual machine.

  Has anyone found a good solution to workaround/resolution on this issue? His line enough, I'm not the only one with the problem. I thought maybe make a reservation of memory for the virtual machine, but I don't like the idea of reserving a portion of the pool - which lack of efficiency is the reason why I went with VM in the first place.

  Also, does anyone know how to check for memory-locked driver under Linux? I wonder if some of my VMs CentOS with 'memory leaks' are experiencing the same problem as well.

  More research Internet gave me to discover who would say that it is WORKING AS DESIGNED. I am too committed the amount of physical memory to my host and VMWare uses his balloon pilot to make each VM think he is lack of memory so that it releases the memory for garbage collection scored for the hypervisor ESXi could know then use these places of memory to provide memory to other virtual machines that need.

  The blog post here is excellent to explain what is happening. The workaround is to set a reservation for your host:

  http://www.vfrank.org/2013/09/18/understanding-VMware-ballooning/

  When I look at the Performance tab for my ESXi host and select memory, the amount balloon measurement is ginormous. It makes sense because all my virtual machines are running VMTools and they are all being inflated so that they can all work together.

  My next task is to determine which combination of tools allocation of memory (booking, priority, pool etc.) will produce the best performance)

• Balloon question

  I'm trying to understand in detail how the balloon pilot really works.

  My previous understanding was the object of the balloon pilot is a way for the hypervisor ro retrieve the memory of guests when memory is overused and fear - it's because guests have no another way to 'give' memory to the hypervisor, or hypervisor knows, and therefore no way, to the memory of relaim according to the needs of the guests.

  Another my understanding, which I am now starting to question, is that this ball always causes the customer to the page (using its internal pagination techniques).  Also, everyone I talk to the same thing, said balloon = pagination in comments.  Really?  What makes me question this is the difference between consumption and and memory active .  Still serves as memory consumed by the virtual machine - in other words, even if it is not active, is not yet been recovered by the hyervisor, so the hypervisor cannot give her other guests.  So my question is: is the typical work of the balloon to reclaim consumed memory (which does not affect the virtual machine) and then active memory (which can cause paging), or does always go after the active memory?

  My reasoning of thought balloon goes after consumed memory and therefore does not always imply the pagination in the comments until we need to get the memory active , is the following excerpt from VMware:

  

  Thoughts? Am I overthinking this?

  Thank you

  Matt

  mattheff wrote:

  Another my understanding, which I am now starting to question, is that this ball always causes the customer to the page (using its internal pagination techniques).  Also, everyone I talk to the same thing, said balloon = pagination in comments.

  Not quite.  The balloon pilot aims to politely ask guests to give back a percentage preset (default 65%) of unreserved memory (memory - reserved memory limit).  It is usually memory on the free list of the guest.  If the memory is actually free, that there is no impact to the guest - he may never used memory sitting on its free list anyway.

  If the memory is not free but is active, this will cause an impact on the guest.  For example, if you the ball in areas of MS SQL, SQL predefined buffer detects this and evacuated its caches, including its query cache.  For Java applications, you might end up taking the memory it uses for its performance of garbage collection and kill.

  Hot air balloon must be handled properly.  Done wrong, you kill you and take memory which can cause requests for comments slow down or crash (Linux OOM-kills is a known side effect).  Fact properly and you free up idle resources and give them to customers who actually need them allowing you to postpone or eliminate the purchase of memory possible.

• Balloon flight, even if there is plenty of RAM

  Hi all

  Help me understand this.  Why did this machine virtual balloon when there is plenty of available RAM?  And why is it always servers database that has the highest consumed host memory even if active memory is only like 20%?  The balloon pilot is on, and when I turn it off then swap back.  Not quite sure what is happening.  The VMTOOLs are up-to-date, I even uninstalled and reinstalled.  I tried setting the limits and reserves, but it never changed.  Any ideas?  Thanks in advance.

  It's the only VM on a host that has 42GBs of RAM. There is a reserve and a deadline to 16GBs

  Looks like the VM has 24GO configured, but 16 GB limit. Up to 24-16 = 8 GB inflated. That's all.

  ---

  MCITP: SA + WILL, VMware vExpert, VCP 3/4

  http://blog.vadmin.ru

• Pilot and bollon transparent page sharing

  Hi friends,

  Please help me with below questions. any info will be great. I need quick help

  -How to enable the transparent page sharing

  -How to activate ball player

  -Whatever it must either be installed on ESX and virtual center to enable the transparent page sharing

  -Whatever it must either be installed on ESX and virtual center to enable the balloon pilot

  Thanks in advance

  -How to enable the transparent page sharing

  It is enabled by default on each host ESX (i).

  -How to activate ball player

  By installing the VMware tools on the guest operating system.

  André

• I have a hp media center tv m7640n and I had to get a copy of the media library but theres a question

  There a? in yellow and I installed all the drivers when I look it says something to do with location on system compatible ACPI Microsoft I have no idea of what's probably missing a driver I installed all windows updates and does not change

  Hello:

  It was what I expected... A very strange balloon pilot who is hard to find.

  I enclose below.

  Unzip it into a folder. Create a folder and unzip it to him and keep the folder where you can easily remember where browse to it.

  You must manually install this driver.

  Click on the? device. Click on update driver driver. Select manual search (specific location), and then navigate to the folder.

  The driver should install.

  Paul

• Shared folders is longer supported?

  In Ubuntu 14.04 (faithful), I correctly filled and installed VMwareTools - 9.6.1 - 1378637.tar.gz, using patches to https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches/tree/master/patches/vmhgfs.

  
  

  I am able to mount a shared folder, but the folder is not usable. Instead, a "Not a directory" error. For example:

  # ls-l/mnt/hgfs

  method: cannot open the directory/mnt/hgfs: not a directory

  
  

  This problem has been reported previously to Re: problem module vmhgfs vmware-tools workstation 9.0.3 inspired 3.13.5 - 103 kernel fedora 19

  and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1272196/ .

  Note that https://bugs.Launchpad.NET/Ubuntu/+source/open-VM-tools/+bug/1272196/comments/5 States:

  
  

  "The vmhgfs module (host VMWare <>- Comments file system)" is no longer supported by VMWare and it builds on recent kernels.".

  
  

  Is it, in fact, true? Shared folders is longer supported?

  
  

  If so, what are the alternatives (other than NFS, Samba, SSHFS, etc.)?
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Hello @rasa

  Unfortunately, I can't make an official statement from VMware, but I think you're wrong interpret this answer.

  The problem is that the distribution of VMware tools is a bit 'complex', the reason is actually to simplify things and have all of the drivers in VMware conveyed by the respective kernel developers and linux distributions.

  There are 3 different "tracks".

  1 Linux "inbox" drivers, for example. the drivers that are part of the kernel / linux distributions, these include, network driver vmxnet3, pvscsci driver, memory balloon pilot, vmwgfx 3d graphics driver, drivers vmci and vsock, see also: KB VMware: VMware for Linux VMware Windows support

  Down on this page you can find the part that responds to your question:

  Why a version of an operating system do not include the vmhgfs driver?

  The vmhgfs driver has been added upstream. To work around this situation, install VMware Tools provided with the workstation or Fusion products, who will install the lack vmhgfs drivers. The VMware Tools installer does not disturb VMware Windows included with the operating system.

  2 open-vmware-tools drivers, these are extra libraries extending the features. This used to contain everything that in the past but parts have been moved to inbox drivers and the part you are looking for drivers - vmhgfs - is part of the supply of office products. See also: KB VMware: VMware to open-vm-tools support

  3. the vmware tools bundled package. This is where you find the vmhgfs driver, your problem is now that you are trying to use Ubuntu 14.04 and that the OS is not out yet (next month). I installed it without any customization here, and while I can list the mount point, that is not to have the shared folder. Drag & drop between guests however works. I'll take a look at why it does not list the part after the OS is updated to the most recent (update has not since last week)

  hope this helps,

  --

  Wil

  Edit: FWIW I reinstalled the vmware tools and he has indeed missed out on the vmhgfs driver. While I can probably patch (errors appear quite trivial) I'm not in that much of a need and prefer to wait that Ubuntu has released faithful and VMware has updated the vmware tools. For now I just use drag & drop as mentioned above.