Checking that a VM has the VMware Balloon driver running with esxtop

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To check that your VMs have loaded and are running the VMware Memory Balloon driver in the guest OS, you can use esxtop.

 

  • Connect to your ESXi host using vMA, the DCUI or PuTTy (needs SSH service running) and run esxtop.
  • Switch to the Memory page (press M)
  • Press F to add a field
  • Press J to add the field “MCTL = MEM Ctl (MB)”
  • Press space to return to the main memory view page of esxtop.
  • In the new MCTL? column, look at the list of VMs – a “Y”  means that the driver is loaded and running whereas a “N” means that the balloon driver is not present.

 

This can be useful to double check things if you run into a problem troubleshooting memory ballooning issues as I have seen cases where VMware Tools reports as “OK” for the VM but the balloon driver is not running when viewed in esxtop.

 

 

7 thoughts on “Checking that a VM has the VMware Balloon driver running with esxtop”

  1. Any Power CLI Script with you?? – to run on Entire “VC” ->
    to find What are all the VM’s had -> MCTL Fileld “N”??

    Regards – Purna

  3. @Dan

    Just saw your comment again and there are two options I can think of:

    Use Get-ESXTop PowerCLI cmdlet to get at this data – or you can check VMware Tools status by delving into properties exposed from a VM with the Get-VM cmdlet. Check under .ExtensionData or possibly .ExtensionData.Config for example – you’ll find the Tools status somewhere there!

    Hope that helps.

    Sean

  4. @Purna

    Hi Purna,

    Are these VMs linux guests built off a template or from scratch, or are they virtual appliances deployed from OVF for example? I would start by restarting the guest first, and if that doesn’t help try reinstalling the VMware Tools if that is an option available to you…

    Sean

  5. Hi Sean,

    I have few VM’s shows “VMtools shows OK at VC” But “esxtop” M,F,J -> Shows “N”
    and “vmmemctl process not running on VM OS”

    -> What should be the resolution step here to make “below Green”

    1) ps -ef | grep -i vmmemctl (inside VM – should show vmmemctl – process running)
    But in my VM – No output for above command

    2) And VM listed as “N” at “esxtop” for “MEMCTL” Field

    Thank you in advance..

  6. Hi Dan,

    I’ll take a look at this hopefully this evening and let you know – my gut feeling is that it should be possible to find out via PowerCLI 🙂

    Sean

  7. This is a very useful field in ESXTOP, thanks – do you know whether it’s exposed in PowerCLI so I can script to find all my VMs which are running with it disabled?

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