Tip of the Day: Dynamic Memory for Linux Guests

Today’s Tip…

In Windows Server 2012 R2, quite a bit of work was put into elevating our support for Linux. One of these areas was in the realm of dynamic memory. For supported Linux distributions, this means that not only can memory be hot added to a virtual machine, but memory can be reallocated to and from the VM as needed by use of a ‘balloon driver’. As more memory is needed from the Linux VM, the balloon driver ‘inflates’ to capture more of the VM’s memory and reallocates it back to the Hyper-V host.

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When more memory is needed by the Linux VM, the balloon is deflated, and memory is returned to the VM.

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