When to Balloon?

[Raymond Burns]

When should Memory Ballooning be used?
I have been using memory ballooning on all my VM's, however, I read that SQL Servers should NOT use Memory Ballooning. So what is the general rule of thumb for using memory ballooning?
What about network monitoring software like a Spiceworks server? Balloon?

 

[screenie]

From my understanding how Balloonig works, i generally would not enable it any critical or production system - only on non-productive systems as it causes the guest to swap memory to disk and reclaim memory back when needed - which slows down the guest;

I would rather partition properly the available memory to the guests, monitor it and increase it if the guest needs more;

A good option for Balloonig would be if you have a guest which needs plenty of memory for a short period of time once a day or so, assigning a lot of memory for a guest like this is waste where Ballooning would make it available for the rest;

Alex