Process of Memory Ballooning
Understanding how a hypervisor works is inextricably linked to understanding the memory ballooning process. A hypervisor abstracts finite system resources and then allocates them to virtual machine processes that are running.
- Host Physical Memory: The underlying server or cloud platform has a set amount of installed system memory, which represents the absolute total amount of available memory.
- Guest Physical Memory: In order to provide resources to running virtual machines, the hypervisor is given a portion of the host’s physical memory. The maximum amount of memory available to the hypervisor is referred to as the guest physical memory.
- Guest Virtual Memory: The hypervisor allocates a portion of its total memory resources to the running guest virtual machines as virtual memory.
In the memory ballooning model, one virtual machine that, for example, had 8 GB of guest virtual memory allocated to it but was not using it could have some of that RAM reallocated to another running virtual machine that needed the extra memory.
The balloon driver keeps track of memory allocations as they move from one virtual machine to the next. The primary goal of memory ballooning is to provide a virtual machine with the memory it requires to meet a spike in process or application demand. This occurs even if it does not normally have sufficient memory allocated to it.
Memory Ballooning in OS
Memory ballooning is a feature of most virtualization platforms to make more efficient use of physical memory for virtual servers. Memory ballooning is a critical component of modern virtualized data storage architectures. With both physical and virtual assets requiring memory resources, a variety of methods for claiming, releasing, and reclaiming memory are required.
In this article, we are going to discuss memory ballooning, what is hypervisor what re different processes of memory ballooning are, its issues and importance, advantages and disadvantages of memory ballooning in operating systems. Here below is a detailed discussion of Memory Ballooning.