OSDI '02 Abstract
Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server
Carl A. Waldspurger, VMware Inc.
Abstract
VMware ESX Server is a thin software layer designed to
multiplex hardware resources efficiently among virtual machines
running unmodified commodity operating systems. This paper introduces
several novel ESX Server mechanisms and policies for managing memory. A
ballooning technique reclaims the pages considered least
valuable by the operating system running in a virtual machine. An
idle memory tax achieves efficient memory utilization while
maintaining performance isolation guarantees. Content-based
page sharing and hot I/O page remapping exploit
transparent page remapping to eliminate redundancy and reduce copying
overheads. These techniques are combined to efficiently support
virtual machine workloads that overcommit memory.
- View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF. Until December 2003, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers.
The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2002 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
|