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one of our VM's is running relatively slowly. it is the only VM running on the ESXi server. In the performance tab the active memory is very low (<1gb), however what is strange is the 'consumed' memory is higher than the granted memory.

I've been reading the manuals, but all I can get from these is ambiguous terminology, like 'consumed memory shows the amount of consumed memory' and 'granted memory shows the amount of granted memory' - which isn't very useful for me.

If I have 8Gb in the server in total and I set the memory to 8Gb on the VM - will this make the VM run slower as I haven't allowed for the overhead of the ESXi server?

Does anyone have any useful references or advice that would help me?

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vSphere Client is the software you use to manage ESX/ESXi/vCenter, the termonoligy you're looking for is "guest" in this question – pauska Oct 28 '10 at 11:31
@pauska - you are correct, it sounds wrong the way I wrote it, so edited. – Mr Shoubs Oct 28 '10 at 11:54

3 Answers

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"If I have 8Gb in the server in total and I set the memory to 8Gb on the VM - will this make the VM run slower as I haven't allowed for the overhead of the ESXi server?"

Only if the VM has requested 8GB of memory, at which point vmkernel will just page and your VM will go dog slow. Are you on 4.1 yet? it compresses memory live.

Feel free to post a snapshot of the VM's config and memory use.

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is there a way of outputting the config? – Mr Shoubs Oct 28 '10 at 14:54
Print-Screen and MSPaint – Chopper3 Oct 28 '10 at 15:09
not very useful for putting it on here... – Mr Shoubs Oct 29 '10 at 10:01
you can post images here. – Chopper3 Oct 29 '10 at 10:09
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I haven't got all the way through it yet, but I found this and this which looks helpful, though the latter seems to contradict what I am seeing.

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You need to leave some memory for the kernel and the service console.

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the first link in my answer would seem to suggest otherwise... if the host needs memory that badly, it has ways of reclaiming it from the guest. – Mr Shoubs Oct 29 '10 at 9:45

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