33.4. Overcommitting Resources

The KVM hypervisor supports overcommitting CPUs and memory. Overcommitting is the process of allocating more virtualized CPUs or memory than there are physical resources on the system. CPU overcommit allows under-utilized virtualized servers or desktops to run on fewer servers which saves power and money.

When using KVM, virtual machines operate as Linux processes. Guests on the KVM hypervisor do not have blocks of physical RAM assigned to them, instead they function as processes. Each process in a Linux system is allocated memory when it requests more memory. In a similar way, KVM allocates memory for guests when the guest requests more or less memory. The guest only uses slightly more physical memory than the virtualized operating system appears to use.

When physical memory is nearly completely used or a process is inactive for some time, Linux moves the process's memory to swap. Swap is usually a partition on a hard disk drive or solid state drive which Linux uses to extend virtual memory. Swap is significantly slower than RAM.

As KVM virtual machines are Linux processes, memory used by guests can be put into swap if the guest is idle or not in heavy use. Memory can be committed over the total size of the swap and physical RAM. This can cause issues if guests use their total RAM. Without sufficient memory and swap space for the virtual machine processes, the system can run completely out of memory, leading to the failure of one or more virtual machine processes.

The swap partition is used for swapping underused memory to the hard drive to speed up memory performance. The default size of the swap partition is calculated from amount of RAM and overcommit ratio. It is recommended to make your swap partition larger if you intend to overcommit memory with KVM. A recommended overcommit ratio is 50% (0.5). The formula used is:

(0.5 * RAM) + (overcommit ratio * RAM) = Recommended swap size

Red Hat Knowledgebase has an article on safely and efficiently determining the size of the swap partition.

Overcommitting guests by swapping out temporarily unused guest memory can be very slow, due to the IO latency introduced by disk seek times. However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization with KVM can often avoid this disk IO penalty by merging multiple pages with identical content into the same physical pages. This is done by the KSM (Kernel Samepage Merging) kernel process, which scans memory to find identical pages. The KSM kernel process uses CPU time to avoid disk IO. This tradeoff is often beneficial in workloads with many smaller, similar guests.

It is possible to run with an overcommit ratio of ten times the number of guests over the amount of physical RAM in the system. This only works with certain application loads (for example desktop virtualization with under 100% usage). Setting overcommit ratios is not a hard formula, you must test and customize the ratio for your environment.

Virtualized CPUs are overcommitted best when each guest only has a single VCPU. The Linux scheduler is very efficient with this type of load. KVM should safely support guests with loads under 100% at a ratio of five VCPUs. Overcommitting single VCPU guests is not an issue.

You cannot overcommit symmetric multiprocessing guests on more than the physical number of processing cores. For example a guest with four VCPUs should not be run on a host with a dual core processor. Overcommitting symmetric multiprocessing guests in over the physical number of processing cores will cause significant performance degradation.

Assigning guests VCPUs up to the number of physical cores is appropriate and works as expected. For example, running guests with four VCPUs on a quad core host. Guests with less than 100% loads should function effectively in this setup.