Analyzing host and VM memory

Often, you need to monitor VM and host memory usage; the good part about this is that VMware vSphere Client exposes two memory statistics in the Summary tab of a VM. These are Consumed Host Memory and Active Guest Memory.

Consumed Host Memory is the amount of host physical memory that is allocated to the VM. Please note that this value includes virtualization overhead as well.

Note that many VMs have oversized vRAM, and the guest operating system is likely to opportunistically fill up its vRAM with unnecessary things (for example, caching everything read from the disk, no matter how unlikely it will be requested again). Consumed Memory only means that the VM used this memory at some point, not that it's likely to use it again.

Active Guest Memory is defined as the amount of guest physical memory that is currently being used by the guest operating system and its applications.

These two statistics are quite useful for analyzing the memory status of the VM and providing hints to address potential performance issues.

For host memory usage, you may want to look at the Resources section of the Summary tab for an ESXi host. To understand how much is the actual VM usage, you need to check the Memory section of the Configuration page.

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Table of Contents for
Analyzing host and VM memory