SAP® Solutions on VMware®

Appendix A. Virtual Machine Memory Settings
The following figure illustrates the memory settings used for a virtual machine.
SAP <strong>Solutions</strong> on VMware
Best Practices Guide
Figure 1. Virtual Machine Memory Settings
Definition of the terms used in Figure 1:
Configured memory – memory size of virtual machine assigned at creation.
Active memory – memory recently accessed by applications in the virtual machine.
Reservation – guaranteed lower bound on the amount of memory that the host reserves for the
virtual machine, which cannot be reclaimed by VMware ESX for other virtual machines.
Swappable – virtual machine memory that can be reclaimed by the balloon driver or, worst case, by
ESX swapping. This is the automatic size of the per-virtual-machine swap file that is created on the
VMFS file system (―.vswp‖ file).
For more information about VMware ESX memory management concepts and the balloon driver, please
consult the VMware Resource Management Guide.
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