The article actually indicates that it may be a carry-over from previous versions and the VMs I saw the issues with were originally on ESX 3.5 (and looking at the Tools version it is still on 3.5, so there’s another update to be done soon ☺). It was also the case that I wasn’t seeing any persistent balloon on the VMs that would correlate to what was being indicated as being used in Windows either.
Not having other hosts to vmotion to isn’t the end of the world – we have many outlying sites with single hosts and local storage where it was just a business decision to take the hit if maintenance needed to be done on hosts, so VMs had to be taken down.
To go back to the original issue though – what does Task Manager show in respect of memory used by processes, compared to what is reported by the Performance tab? That was another thing I noticed in that the Processes were using (at a rough calculation) around 8GB (which correlated to what vCenter said was being consumed), while Performance tab reported using 14GB. That could again point to a potential issue with balloon driver.
