논문 리뷰 (paper review); Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server

May 13, 2026

Those are the slides made for the paper review presentation in OS lecture. (CS530 @ KAIST)

Title: Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server
Author: Carl A. Waldspurger (VMware, Inc.)
Presented at OSDI 2002.

All the slides are made by me. Also, I made the presentation myself during the class. No unauthorized citation. Contact me for the permission.

KAIST CS530 운영체제 강의에서 논문 리뷰 발표의 일환으로 제작한 슬라이드 입니다.
모든 슬라이드는 제가 직접 제작하였으며, 혼자 수업에서 발표하였습니다.
무단 인용을 금지합니다.
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TL;DR

Introduces “mechanisms and policies” used to manage memory resource in ESX Server.
Describes how each virtual machine (VM) can allocated memory across VMs and retrieves memory from the VM, while running unmodified commodity OS on each VM.
Ballooning: Reclaim memory from VM by implicitly causing the geust OS to invoke its own memory management algorithms
Content-based transparent page sharing: Additional optimization (i.e. sharing) to reduce overall memory pressure in the system without guest OS involvement
Idle memory tax: Enable both performance isolation (via share, 지분) and efficient memory utilization
Dynamic reallocation policy: Coordinate above techniques to efficiently support VM workloads that overcommit memory
I/O page remapping: Reduce I/O copying overheads, utilizing physical-to-machine address mapping

Comments

This paper is an important milestone in OS virtualization research.
Ballooning technique is still used nowadays. It’s a beautiful technique that enables the participation of guest OS in memory reclamation.
Economical analysis of shares-per-page and idle memory tax: If we think ‘share’ as the total assets and ‘page’ as a unit of item, then shares-per-page becomes the ‘price’. This aligns with the min-funding revocation algorithm which revokes the page from the client with lowest price. (lowest shares-per-page) Also, if there is more actively using page, shares-per-page (i.e. price) increases. We can think it as ‘tax’ related to active page. (In real economy, tax is something that increases the price depending on some factor.)