I’ve wanted more support for virtualized DragonFly systems. Sascha Wildner put together an experimental balloon memory driver to test out, and I ran it on two virtual machines separately, one with it loaded and one without, on the same host system. The problem is, I can’t tell what it does. The two machine reported almost the exact same RAM usage during a buildworld.
Any VMWare/virtualization experts out there able to tell me what needs to be tested to verify this?
Hello, Justin! Did you try to test it under KVM?
I did it under VMWare Server 5.1 – used Veeam to watch the RAM usage, which didn’t seem to show any RAM-related differences.
I think you need to do things on the virtual machines that cause them to use up a lot of RAM, and then stop doing those things. Then fire up more virtual machines that need some more RAM and see if vmware can use the balloon driver to reclaim some RAM from the first set of virtual machines with the driver installed.
That was a long sentence.
Essentially VMWare can “inflate” the ballon driver inside a VM to make sure some RAM isn’t used by something else. Then reclaim that RAM.
Hello again :) I’ve tried lastest image under KVM and I didn’t see any difference with or without balloon memory. I think it’s because of lack of any memory usage in virtual machine.