PowerCLI: Find Resourcepool or VMs with Memory Ballooning/Swap Usage

In this post I will show you how to report Resource Pools and VMs with active Memory Ballooning. But what is Memory Ballooning. I short quote from the ESX3 memory whitepaper http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_memory.pdf:

The balloon driver, also known as the vmmemctl driver, collaborates with the server to reclaim pages that are considered least valuable by the guest operating system. It essentially acts like a native program in the operating system that requires more and more memory. The driver uses a proprietary ballooning technique that provides predictable performance that closely matches the behavior of a native system under similar memory constraints. This technique effectively increases or decreases memory pressure on the guest operating system, causing the guest to invoke its own native memory management algorithms. When memory is tight, the guest operating system decides which particular pages to reclaim and, if necessary, swaps them to its own virtual disk.

You need to be sure your guest operating systems have sufficient swap space. This swap space must be greater than or equal to the difference between the virtual machine’s configured memory size and its reservation.

More information about Memory ballooning can also be found in this post by Arnim van Lieshout.

So let’s continue with the PowerCLI scripts.

The following script will report all the resource pools with active Memory Ballooning:

$myCol = @()
foreach($clus in (Get-Cluster)){
 foreach($rp in (Get-ResourcePool -Location $clus | Get-View | Where-Object `
  {$_.Name -ne "Resources" -and `
   $_.Summary.QuickStats.BalloonedMemory -ne "0"})){
   $Details = "" | Select-Object Cluster, ResourcePool, `
   SwappedMemory ,BalloonedMemory

    $Details.Cluster = $clus.Name
    $Details.ResourcePool = $rp.Name
    $Details.SwappedMemory = $rp.Summary.QuickStats.SwappedMemory
    $Details.BalloonedMemory = $rp.Summary.QuickStats.BalloonedMemory

    $myCol += $Details
  }
}
$myCol

#$myCol | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation C:\RPs-Ballooning.csv

This will be the output:

If you add the script to a powerpack within the Virtualization EcoShell, It will look like this:

If you want to report the VMs with active memory ballooning, you can run the following script:

$myCol = @()
foreach($vm in (Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | Where-Object `
  {$_.Summary.QuickStats.BalloonedMemory -ne "0"})){
   $Details = "" | Select-Object VM, `
   SwappedMemory ,BalloonedMemory

    $Details.VM = $vm.Name
    $Details.SwappedMemory = $vm.Summary.QuickStats.SwappedMemory
    $Details.BalloonedMemory = $vm.Summary.QuickStats.BalloonedMemory

    $myCol += $Details
  }
$myCol

And within a couple of seconds, you’ll get a list with all the VMs with active ballooning:

If you add the script to a powerpack within the Virtualization EcoShell, It will look like this: