Memory hot-plugging on VMWare - reliability and alternatives

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12

Situation

For the above SLES server versions, running as virtual machines on VMware vSphere, the "memory hot-plugging" feature is not consistently and reliably adding additional memory on the fly.

The SLES server has the prerequisites correctly installed:

a current vmtools RPM installed on the server
acpiphp
acpi_memhotplug

Resolution

While memory hot-plugging is getting better, it's still not completely reliable. Therefore, it is recommended to use memory ballooning (instead of hot-plugging). Memory ballooning has worked well for quite some time.

Cause

Additional Information

Disclaimer

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