Task Manager vs. vCenter reported Memory

[Caz9999]

Hi everyone!

In my organization, we are having a problem that has become a headache for the Cloud Services Team. As many surely know, the Task Manager in the Windows 2008 VM's normally reports very different values than the ones of the vCenter's Performance tab. For example, the task manager of one VM can show that has the 90% of the memory in use, but in the vCenter you can see statics of, for example 20% of the active memory used at the same time.

Why are those statics so diferent in Windows 2008 (or any Windows ver 7 for that matter)? How do you recommend me to handle this with our costumers? Is there a way to match what they are seeing in the task manager to what I'm seeing in the vCenter, so they don't have to buy useless resoursces,  or at least something I can use to explain this behavior better to them?

[idle-jam]

VMware vSphere has advance memory management such as memory ballooning, transparent page sharing, swap and etc. With this in place, the value between vCenter and Task manager is not longer the same, but then what appear in the task manager is the actual use of the OS, and that the vcenter shows what is being done after the advanced memory management. i would suggest them looking at the task manager for the users, where as for the cloud admin to look at vcenter. at the end of the day with the advance memory management, you guys could resell more and make more $$ for the service provided, isnt that good? :)

[Caz9999]

Thatś really usefull; But how can we explain to our costumers that they'll always see more RAM used. I mean, in this versions of Windows, the Ram usage is always in betwen 80% and 90 %, and there are not (normally) performance issues.