[ale] VMware Server 2.0 resource usage calculations.

[Brian Pitts]

On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 09:30 -0500, Ed Landa wrote:
> > I just installed a CentOS 5.2 guest today and did updates.  VMware is
> > telling me that the guest is using 25MB.  Free on the guest tells me
> > a totally different story.
> 
> IIRC, vmware actually consolidates identical pages across multiple
> virtual machines.  So, if you have an identical libc paged in on 3
> machines, it only stores one copy in memory and references it from each
> of the VMs.  There is a stat to account for this, but I've forgotten the
> term.

Some developers were adding this capability more generically to the
kernel [0], but it appears VMware has patented the idea. [1]

[0] http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/309155/

-Brian