overcommitment

It's easy to see how people who are in corporate situations fall into the overcommitment trap.

Cloudy is an easy-to-set-up LAMP benchmark that measures virtualization scalability and shows the effects of resource overcommitment.

But unlike regular processes, KVM guests contain a nested operating system, which impacts memory overcommitment in two key ways.

Resource overcommitment is crucial to maximizing the benefits of virtualization and the subject of much research and development.

Linux provides additional mechanisms to address memory overcommitment specific to virtualization.

A holistic, policy-driven approach to managing overcommitment is the best way to maximize efficiency and drive incremental improvements.

A thorough investigation of memory overcommitment in KVM should begin with the Linux memory manager itself.

The performance impacts of memory overcommitment could be reduced if a similar guest-driven protocol existed for yielding memory resources.

KVM guests can have greater memory overcommitment potential than regular processes.

As Linux virtualization evolves, so too will overcommitment best practices.

Memory overcommitment can increase the demand for all other system resources.

As demonstrated, an overcommitment policy can help in some situations and cause harm in others.

Because it is built on the concepts of virtual memory, Linux employs memory overcommitment techniques by design.

Although I'm the guy writing this column, I clearly still have a lot to learn about avoiding overcommitment.