Vladan SEGET created a blog post on VMware ESX(i) 4.1 Memory Compression. In his post, he linked to a fantastically simple vmwaretv video demonstration of memory compression in action compared to a hypervisor with no memory compression enabled. For anyone looking for the tool used in the video to perform your own memory compression testing but cannot find it, it’s “around”. Let me know and I might be able to help you find it.
I was going to update my memory compression blog post crediting Vladan and embedding the video, but sadly, I have no memory compression blog post yet! So instead, I send you to Vladan’s ESX Virtualization blog using the link above.
Note to self: create a memory compression blog post.
I make a lot of notes to myself like that. In fact, I get downright irritated with myself when I know I should have blogged about something already, and someone beat me to it! 🙂
On a more relevant note, I’ve seen memory compression in action inadvertently in my environments and it sure beats the heck out of swap.
Recently I was one of the attendees at a super secret WebEx session hosted by VMware. In this session there was a real cool demo regarding an upcoming memory maximization technology called memory compression. One of the presenters used a special self written Memory Performance Testing utility to outline the speed of different types of memory. A few days ago I recorded a video about the impact of using virtual machine memory limits and I used the same utility to prove that reading from ballooned memory will have a performance penalty. I’ve received a great number of requests for a copy of the Memory Performance Tool which was written by Joey Dieckhans; a performance specialist in the Technical Marketing group at VMware. Joey was very glad to hear people liked it and has provided the Memory Performance Tester and the source code for public use.
So if you’re a Visual Basic programmer and you’re able to add new features please give me a heads up so we can share new (more advanced) versions in te future.
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1529-Memory-Performance-Tester.html
Actually the Memory Performance Tester isn’t too much of a secret http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1529-Memory-Performance-Tester.html
Argh, Eric beat me to it. Can we maybe – with the permission of Joey – give it a snappy name and host it on SourceForge or something?