[libvirt] Memory

Hi Jaromír 2010/7/17 Jaromír Červenka <cervajz(a)cervajz.com&gt;: In qemu-kvm case, currentMemory means actual amount of memory (or initial amount of memory) which you allow the guest to use and maxMemory means the maximum amount of memory which you (or admin) can increase up to, through libvirt. With your setting, libvirt launches the VM with 1024MB memory and then reduces the amount of memory down to 512MB through balloon driver. So 512MB which you're seeing in the guest is correct and expected. Because the rest of the memory has been reclaimed by the hypervisor, the guest cannot gain more memory than 512MB. The answer for the question--what happened?--is that the guest OS will behave as same as when it has just 512MB memory and gets memory pressure, i.e., reclaim memory, do swapping, or something. If you want to allow the guest to gain more memory, at first you need to increase the amount of guest memory through the balloon driver (you know you can change the amount up to maxMemory at maximum). You can use virsh setmem for that.  ozaki-r