I just received a great PDF on memory statistic defintions for VirtualCenter:
It is important to note that some definitions refer to guest physical memory while others talk about machine memory. “Guest physical memory” is really virtual-hardware “physical” memory presented to the VM. “Machine memory” is the actual physical RAM in the ESX host. Each definition below will explicitly specify the type of memory to which it applies. See [2] pages 139 – 141 for more information about guest physical memory versus machine memory.
This distinction plays out in interesting and potentially confusing ways. The final section, “Differences between Memory Granted/Consumed and Memory Shared/Shared Common”, expands on the differences between guest physical memory and machine memory metrics.
Read this document, it really contains a lot of useful information!!!
Anton says
File isn’t available(
Eric Siebert says
Cool, if anyone knows about memory it’s definitely Kit. I’ll add it to my arsenal of memory related links.
Andrew Storrs says
Thanks for passing this along Duncan, this is great information as some of those counters can be a little ambiguous.
Virtual_JTW says
Link broke. I found it here:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~omerta/VI%203.5%20Memory%20Statistic%20Definitions.pdf
Duncan Epping says
I know, I posted it on there… they changed the link. let’s see if I can find the original again, but I will keep this one up for a while.