Recently we bought a Dell PowerEdge T610 with a couple of Intel Xeon Nehalem L5520 processors to serve as a ESX Foundation Server for our new Seoul South Korea office. It was installed and set up on site with two guest machines running nothing heavy but still room for some growth.
After about a week or two we started to notice that vCenter was regularly reporting memory at 95%-100% utilized on the guests and it was constantly in an alert state. After doing some investigating I noticed the actual guest machines were not using very much memory at all. So I gathered some information and did some googling on it and I came across this thread on the VMware Communities Forums:
ESX4 + Nehalem Host + vMMU = Broken TPS !
It seems that this is more an issue of vCenter reporting the information incorrectly (not only Nehalem processors) and the temporary fix is to set Mem.AllocGuestLargePage to 0 instead of it's default which is 1. It has been stated that this could cause a noticeable performance issue. However, the guests on the particular host I found this on should not really be affected since they are some simple infrastructure services and a file server. So I made the change and had to reboot since I could not vMotion the guests off (foundation box). Instantly it began to work and report the correct memory usage.
VMware stated that an actual fix for this should be released in Patch 2 with a rough time estimate of mid to late September. Still have not seen this patch released but now have two hosts experiencing this issue I have corrected with the workaround. I will be keeping my eyes on the new KBs and updates for this.
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