Memory counters at the ESXi level
vCenter 6.0 Update 1 provides even more counters at the ESXi level: 38 counters for RAM plus 11 for vmkernel RAM. The vmkernel has around 50 processes that are tracked. As a result, a cluster of 8 ESXi can have over 800 counters just for ESXi RAM!
The counters are shown in the next screenshot. Most of them are not shown as a percentage, making it difficult to compare across ESXi hosts with different memory sizes.
ESXi – RAM counters
As for the vmkernel processes, they are not shown under the Memory group, but under the System group. In most cases, you do not need to track the CPU or RAM consumed by the kernel processes. We have covered them in Chapter 13, Memory Counters, so we will not repeat that here. From the following chart, you can see that the vmkernel takes up negligible memory:
ESXi kernel memory utilization
If you need to track the memory consumption of vmkernel, vRealize Operations provides two counters, as shown next:
VMkernel Usage and ESX...
