VM Memory/balloon alarms

[pufferdude]

I recently installed Veeam monitor 5 (full version) and pointed it at my vCenter. Almost immediately it started reporting "VM Memory swap usage" and "High balloon memory utilization" on about half of my 22 VMs (living on two ESX 4.1 hosts) and these repeat every 10 minutes. I've read the description of the alarms within Veeam monitor, but I don't really understand what they mean.

Before I call support I thought I would ask here if this is "normal", false alarms, a default threshold set too low, or something else? Both hosts have plenty of physical memory left (50% on one, 40% on the other) so the guest VMs shouldn't be memory constrained at ALL at this point. Just looking for suggestions, I guess.

[Alexey D.]

Hello Jim,

Could you please open vSphere client and take a look at VMs' performance metrics with it? Do you see swapping/ballooning? Which numbers do you get?

[Vitaliy S.]

Jim,

There are no false alarms, and I haven't seen any reports regarding low default thresholds for these alarms. Could you please tell what is the current Memory swap usage/balloon memory utilization? Based on the numbers you have, you can adjust the default values for these alarms.

Also please take a look at these links for further understanding those metrics:

Memory Use/DPM/Balloon/Swap
High Virtual Memory usage on ESX Server
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere® 4.0 (page 23)

Hope this helps.

[pufferdude]

When I look at any host's Performance metrics in the VC client, both the "Balloon" and "Swap out/in rate" show very low... it's hard to tell the exact number, but right above 0.0 in all cases. I'm not really sure what I'm looking for...

[freeride98233]

I've got a guest doing this too. My balloon goes up to almost 11,000 MB. Of course my first response is, "so what?" and then I want to reconfigure the alarm so it doesn't come back up. Is there anything I should be concerned about? Should I add more memory to the guest?

Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

No need to add more memory to the guest. The first thing that I would suggest to do is to investigate why do you have VM memory balloon metric rising so high.

Based on the KB article provided with each triggered alarm in Veeam ONE, I would recommend to take a look at the host memory usage, swap rates etc. Besides, could you please tell me how many VMs in total do you run on this host?

[cffit]

I get the high balloon memory usage error a lot, and when I look at vCenter it shows that I have none. I took screen shots at the same time of both the environments that I'd like to post. Is there a way to post screen shots on here?

[Vitaliy S.]

Christensen,

Yes, you can upload screenshots to any 3rd party web site and then specify URL to the image. As to your issue...can you please clarify whether you do not see this alarm or you do not see the same performance graph for memory balloon counter?

Thank you!

[cffit]

Yes, I get the alarm, but when I go to look in vCenter under the VM - Resource Allocation tab, I see under Guest Memory that the "Ballooned" memory is 0.00MB.

[Vitaliy S.]

What about Veeam ONE Monitor Client? If you compare performance graphs from vSphere Client and Monitor Client, do you see the same chart?