I've never had this issue before, but when I was enabling fault tolerance, it seemed to break something and now my guests are consuming ALL of it's memory on the host.
I know with fault tolerance, you need to have the guest reserve all host memory but I have disabled fault tolerance (in the networking section, not sure if there is somewhere else) and it is still consuming all memory.
I have three Windows Server 2012 guests and they are only consuming 81MB, 204MB, and 40MB guest memory. Those three are consuming a total of 11.5GB of host memory…
Usually, they would all consume about 100MB host memory over the guest consumed memory — and they would share all memory being they are all the same OS.
How come all of these machines are reserving all memory?
Is there a setting for this somewhere in advanced settings, that enabling fault tolerance and HA enabled?
Best Answer
I think you're misunderstanding the data here. The situation you're in has nothing to do with whether or not you have FT enabled.
The "overhead" column you're referencing really has nothing to do with how much memory the guest is consuming. Rather, that column indicates the amount of memory that the hypervisor requires to power that machine on. The hypervisor uses this "overhead" space to do its own internal bookkeeping for the VM in question.
Unless you want to get into a memory over-subscription situation (not recommended), the "Max" and "Usage" columns are where you want to direct your attention.
Additionally, I'd recommend that you spend a few quality hours going over this section of VMware's documentation on memory resources.