Memory resource management in VMware ESX server

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...

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Veröffentlicht in:Operating systems review 2002-12, Vol.36 (SI), p.181-194
1. Verfasser: Waldspurger, Carl A.
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung: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.
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/844128.844146