Managing Resource Allocation
Nicholas Marshall, Mike Brown, G. Blair Fritz, Ryan Johnson · 2018
This chapter discusses how an ESXi host allocates four key resources and how administrators can change the way these resources are consumed. The resources are memory, processors, disks, and networks. The chapter helps the administrators to manage memory allocation, manage CPU utilization, create and manage resource pools, control network I/O utilization, control storage I/O utilization, and use local flash storage. For vSphere, controlling memory or CPU allocation and utilization is relatively easy. The hypervisor determines how busy the CPU is and whether physical memory has been depleted. Swap to Host Cache is a feature that allocates a portion of local flash storage to be the location of a virtual machine (VM) swap file. This feature is beneficial only within environments that have memory contention to the point that the hypervisor must swap unreserved VM memory to disk.