How to Verify That The Memory Balloon Driver Is Enabled For VMware Virtual Machines

In this blog post, we are going to see how to verify that the memory balloon driver is enabled for a virtual machine or not. While troubleshooting virtual machine performance, we need this information. We will try to keep it simple so that you can understand it better.

Let’s have a look on steps:

1. SSH to the ESXi host using Putty. (It can be downloaded from here)
2. Once you logged in, Type esxtop command and hit enter. You will see the next screen as below:

3. Now you have to click M to get the memory states on the console. Once you press it, will get a screen like:

4. Now press F to get the Balloon Driver Stats option. After it, You will see below screen:

5. Now you have to enter J to get MCTL = MEM Ctl (MB) aka ballooning details. Next screen will:

Let us explain about above information.

Here Name implies the name of Virtual Machines that are hosted on the ESXi host and in MCTL column Y represents that Yes Memory Balloon is Enabled for the virtual machines. That’s it.

Keep Learnings,

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