I wonder about a few memory settings for a server running VirtualBox and simultaniously acting as a small file server.
The server has 24GB memory, running Solaris 11.3. The sum of RAM for the running VMs is 11.25GB, and the sum of the processes rss (and vss) is close to this value. However, my kernel memory seems to be exhausted:
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root@vmhost:~# echo "::memstat" | mdb -k
Page Summary Pages Bytes %Tot
---------------------------- ---------------- ---------------- ----
Kernel 5601305 21.3G 89% <-------- Wow!!!!
Defdump prealloc 171182 668.6M 3%
ZFS 82094 320.6M 1%
Anon 165536 646.6M 3%
Exec and libs 5788 22.6M 0%
Page cache 94703 369.9M 2%
Free (cachelist) 239 956k 0%
Free (freelist) 168349 657.6M 3%
Total 6289196 23.9G
So could somebody clarify a few points for me, please?
1) do Virtual Machines started with VBoxHeadless allocate the per-guest configured memory as kernel memory, or is it "regular" memory? (of course I know a few MB kernel memory will be used by the network drivers, I care more about those 4GB virtual RAM for a VM)
2) is this memory locked in RAM, so it can't be paged out?
3) should I limit the arc cache using the mentioned procedure to make sure my VMs are held in memory?
Thank you for your precious feedback,
Peter