vSphere vs Hyper-V Performance showdown - memory management features

I’ll continue the background on vSphere and Hyper-V by looking at some of the memory management features available in each.

 

vSphere memory management features

 

Transparent page sharing – a technique that vSphere uses to make redundant copies of pages and basically eliminate those pages.

Ballooning  – which is in essence borrowing memory. You can see from the diagram above that the balloon essentially inflates and takes memory away from a virtual guest, making it available to another guest.

Memory compression – allows pages to be swapped to a cache in memory, rather than disk.  When placed into the cache they are compressed, thus allowing pages in memory to be freed up.

 Paging – If memory gets tight it will page out to disk and make more memory available.

 Hyper-V memory management feature

Hyper-V is quite a bit different in that you do not have as many memory management features, the main feature that you have is dynamic memory.

 

 

 

Dynamic memory for enlightened Windows VMs – it will dynamically allocate memory to the windows virtual machines (not available for Linux) with hooks into the Operating System.

 

Next week I’ll share a list of what I consider to be the key performance metrics that I'd advise you to look at for capacity and performance management, the challenges in benchmarking virtual environments and explain my test environment and testing methods when comparing vSphere with Hyper-V.

 

Dale Feiste

Consultant