As others have said, try a VMware forum for more definite answers. I use VMware slightly but I'm not anything like an expert.
Meanwhile, one thing to keep in mind is that the guest OS can't tell when VMware trims the guest's memory. The guest always sees as much as it was allocated. VMware can page some of that memory in and out if it is overcommitted, but it won't inform the guest because it has no way to do that. IF VMware permits one to change a running guest's memory allocation, then it MIGHT try to signal a memory-hotplug event, but I doubt that it does this. It would be dicey to assume that a guest even knows what hot-pluggable memory is, since such hardware is far from ubiquitous. But that wasn't the OP's question. Anyway you may not like the performance you get if there is swapping at any level. People talk about virtual memory as if the ability to run V>R is what it is for, but really that is a side effect and we do well to avoid it. The real benefit is that, at the cost of some complexity, paging is far less laborious and time-consuming than shuffling whole address-spaces. Best to run V=R and just use VM to enable the best memory packing with the least delay. Running overcommitted is really just another way of saying that one is running underprovisioned, and should be corrected. I have a moderately overcommitted VMware Server instance just to my left as I write this, and it is painfully slow, on a blazing fast Pentium 4. OTOH, while it is often said that memory is cheap, reality is more complex. Memory comes out of the supplies budget while configuration juggling is paid out of salaries, and these are separate budget lines. Configuration can be done right now, while procurement takes time -- often a lot of time. So overcommitting a VMware host might be a reasonable short-term approach while one is budgeting, pushing papers, and waiting for one's purchase to arrive. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mw...@iupui.edu Friends don't let friends publish revisable-form documents.
pgp5KVksBmkqe.pgp
Description: PGP signature
