What is a Hypervisor?
Memory ballooning occurs within the context of a virtualization hypervisor. A hypervisor is a technology that allows virtual machines to run by providing a virtual abstraction layer for software.
Today, several hypervisor technologies are widely used, including VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and the open source Xen and KVM technologies. Each hypervisor can be used to enable guest virtual machines, which run operating systems and applications in a virtualized fashion.
Drivers are used by the hypervisor across running guest virtual machines to handle various requirements, such as resource constraints such as virtual CPUs, disc space, and memory. The balloon drivers operate across virtual machines, allowing a hypervisor to reallocate memory from one virtual machine to another.
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.