A virtual machine is exhibiting these symptoms: - Memory usage is constantly high (94% or greater) or constantly low (24% or less). - Free memory is consistently 6% or less and swapping frequently occ

VMware Tools installs the balloon driver inside the guest OS, enabling ESXi to reclaim memory through ballooning before resorting to slower host-level swapping, which directly reduces swap frequency.

If a memory reservation exceeds the VM's active working set, the surplus reserved pages cannot be reclaimed by ESXi for other VMs; lowering the reservation to match active memory frees physical pages and eases host memory pressure.

Adding physical RAM to the host increases the total memory pool available to all VMs, reducing how often ESXi must reclaim memory through ballooning or swapping to satisfy concurrent memory demands.

Disabling the balloon driver eliminates a key reclamation technique and forces ESXi to rely exclusively on swapping, which is significantly slower and would worsen rather than alleviate the performance issue.

Creating a memory limit artificially restricts how much RAM a VM can use, which can intensify memory pressure inside the guest and does not resolve the underlying shortage of physical memory on the host.