Something you might have missed…. A little known feature of vSphere 5.0 called VMX swap helps to reduce the memory footprint of the VMX process by up to 80%. The vSphere kernel has several internal processes, agents, and data structures that require physical memory. vSphere reserves physical memory on the host to assure that these internal vSphere processes always have the physical memory they need. Sometimes these reservations are more than the process is actually currently using. The VMX process manages data structures needed to bootstrap and support the guest and has a memory reservation of approximately 50MB but can vary depending on virtual machine size and configuration.
To allow for better utilization of physical host memory and higher consolidation levels, vSphere 5.0 introduced the ability to create a swap location for the VMX process for a virtual machine. By having a swap location backing the memory for the VMX process, vSphere can reduce the physical memory consumed by the VMX process by allowing parts of the memory to be swapped out when the host is under memory pressure.
This feature is enabled by default in vSphere 5.0 and vSphere will automatically create the VMX swap file for each virtual machine when the virtual machine is powered on. By default, the VMX swap file is created in the virtual machine’s working directory but a different location can be set with sched.swap.vmxSwapDir. Although not recommended, the VMX swap feature can be disabled on a virtual machine by setting sched.swap.vmxSwapEnabled to FALSE.
This feature can reduce the VMX memory reservation from about 50MB or more per virtual machine to about 10MB per virtual machine with no noticeable performance impact. Although a savings of 40MB might not seem like a huge amount, with today’s hosts being able to support higher levels of consolidation and running more and more virtual machines per host, every little bit helps and it can add up to some big savings. This is especially true for environments where a very large number of virtual machines run on a single host, for instance VMware View / VDI environments where potentially hundreds of virtual machines, each with their own VMX process, are running on a single host.
For more details on the VMX Swap feature and other performance features and best practices for vSphere 5.0 that you might have missed see the vSphere 5.0 Performance Best Practices white paper http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.0.pdf
