How to decipher alarms fired by ESX Server Consumed vs Granted Memory Rule (4271208)

How to decipher alarms fired by ESX Server Consumed vs Granted Memory Rule

If the application workload of the ESX Server is requesting an excessive amount of the available memory resources, either add memory to the ESX Server or use VMotion to better balance the virtual machines across the servers within the cluster.

The rule in question, VMW Server Consumed vs Granted Memory, uses these two metrics and when the consumed value reaches different percentage values (defined by the registry variables) of the granted value the rule generates an alarm. The severity of the alarm is determined by which of the registry variable value was exceeded.

To check the current values :

1. In FMS console navigate to Dashboards | Vmware | vmExplorer

2. Select the ESX host for referenced in the alarm

3. Click on Monitor Tab

4. Scroll down to Memory Utilization table

VMware defines these metrics for ESX Hosts in the following ways:

Consumed Memory:

Amount of machine memory used on the host. Consumed memory includes Includes memory used by the Service Console, the VMkernel, vSphere services, plus the total consumed metrics for all running virtual machines.

host consumed memory = total host memory - free host memory

Granted Memory:

Amount of machine memory or "physical" memory.

Sum of all granted metrics for all powered-on virtual machines, plus machine memory for vSphere services on the host.