ResearchIndex

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.

publisher:

ACM Press

pages:

181--194

booktitle:

Proc. of Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)

type:

inproceedings

year:

2002

annote:

Carl A. Waldspurger (VMware , Inc.; Palo Alto , CA 94304 USA);

address:

New York

month:

dec # " ~9--11

series:

Operating Systems Review