Memory resource management in VMware ESX server

  • Authors:
  • Carl A. Waldspurger

  • Affiliations:
  • VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - OSDI '02: Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

VMware ESX Server is a thin software layer designed to multiplex hardware resources efficiently among virtual machines running unmodified commodity operating systems. This paper introduces several novel ESX Server mechanisms and policies for managing memory. A ballooning technique reclaims the pages considered least valuable by the operating system running in a virtual machine. An idle memory tax achieves efficient memory utilization while maintaining performance isolation guarantees. Content-based page sharing and hot I/O page remapping exploit transparent page remapping to eliminate redundancy and reduce copying overheads. These techniques are combined to efficiently support virtual machine workloads that overcommit memory.