Memory Comprssion

Deathmage

Hey guys,

When would be a scenario when you would increase the memory compression past the default 10%?

iBrokeIT

When you have poor capacity planning

Deathmage

iBrokeIT wrote: »

When you have poor capacity planning

So say I want to do this intentionally at home....

If I have one host at 32 GB's and I just bumped the other one to 16 GB's of RAM, DRS is so funny it immediately noticed the cluster unbalanced and started svMotion'n stuff, if I set the memory compression to say 50% on the host with the reduced memory would that be a good example of when to increase memory compression?

ie:

darkerosxx

I can't see a good reason why you'd ever want to increase it, outside of your resources being completely maxed and you're willing to give up performance for more memory space. Even then, it's risky business and not a good idea if you're running anything production. In the ideal situation, you would get more resources before you add the next VM. If you're just wanting to test, either turn off DRS or add more VM's.

Deathmage

darkerosxx wrote: »

I can't see a good reason why you'd ever want to increase it, outside of your resources being completely maxed and you're willing to give up performance for more memory space. Even then, it's risky business and not a good idea if you're running anything production. In the ideal situation, you would get more resources before you add the next VM. If you're just wanting to test, either turn off DRS or add more VM's.

So morale of story, a well planned and build cluster should have enough resources where memory compression should really only be a concept not something you actually want to lean on...

good to know!

darkerosxx

I think of it is a failsafe. It's a tool in your arsenal to get things done, but it's optimal to not *have to* use it, because it puts you in a position where other bad things happen.

scott28tt

Your host is already under memory pressure if compression needs to kick in...