Showing posts with label vcenter performance counters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vcenter performance counters. Show all posts

Thursday 18 February 2016

What is difference between Usage, Active and Consumed parameters of performance monitoring in VMware vSphere ?

Or, Understanding Memory Usage, Active Memory, and Consumed Memory in VMware vSphere.

Memory Usage -
This parameter shows how much % of memory or CPU is being used by the Specific Virtual Machine against of the ESXi host on which this Virtual Machine is existing at that particular time.
For Example: If your virtual machine is assigned with 10GB RAM and the ESXi host which is hosting this VM is having 100GB RAM, and the RAM usage in vSphere client for this VM is showing as 5%, it means Your virtual machine is utilizing 5% memory of the current ESXi host not 5% of total assigned memory to this virtual machine (10 GB).

Active Memory:
it shows amount of memory that is actively used, as estimated by VMkernel based on recently touched memory pages. Because, VMs does not use all the allocated memory if it’s not needed by them actually. It only use the memory what it need.

Consumed Memory:
Amount of guest physical memory consumed by the virtual machine for guest memory. Consumed memory does not include overhead memory. It includes shared memory and memory that might be reserved, but not actually used. Use this metric for charge-back purposes.

I have written it as per my best understanding till now. If you have any query or suggestion, please write me back.. 

Explanation for these parameters are different for ESXi Hosts. The above explanation is valid only for Virtual Machines.