How to do it…

Balloon activity can also be monitored in Performance Chart through vSphere Web Client. The counter that you should follow in this case is Balloon Average in kilobytes.

You should select the same counter when you monitor the ballooning activity for ESXi as well.

To monitor the ballooning activity using the vSphere client for individual VM, follow these steps:

1. Open vSphere Web Client.
2. Log in to your vCenter Server.
3. On your Home screen, select Hosts and Clusters.
4. Choose the memory-hungry VM.
5. Click on the Monitor tab, then the Performance tab, and then click on Advanced.
6. Change the view to Memory.
7. Click on Chart Options.
8. Select the Active, Ballooned Memory, and Consumed counters.
9. Click on OK. Now you should see something similar to the following image if there is ballooning activity on your VM:

In this example, you can see that this VM (Memhog-1) is releasing its inactive Memory pages to the host memory. Here it is 1167968 KB.

To monitor the ballooning activity for your ESXi using the vSphere client, follow these steps:

1. Open vSphere Web Client.
2. Log in to your vCenter Server.
3. On your Home screen, select Hosts and Clusters.
4. Choose the poorly performing ESXi host.
5. Go to the Monitor tab, then the Performance tab, and finally click on Advanced.
6. Switch the view to Memory.
7. Select Chart Options.
8. Select the Active, Ballooned Memory, and Consumed counters. 
9. Click on OK. Now you should see something similar to this if there is ballooning activity on your ESXi host:

In this example, you can see that this ESXi host is involved in ballooning and its VMs are actively releasing inActive Memory pages.