Memory paging is a memory management technique for controlling how a computer or

virtual machine's (VM's) memory resources are shared.

A computer can address memory beyond the amount physically installed on the syst
em. This nonphysical memory, which is called virtual memory, is actually a secti
on of a hard disk that's set up to emulate the computer's RAM. The concept of vi
rtual memory comes from a time when physical memory, the amount of RAM installed
on a computer, was extremely expensive. The portion of the hard disk that acts
as physical memory is called a page file.
When a computer runs out of RAM, the operating system (OS) will move pages of me
mory over to the computer's hard disk to free up RAM for other processes. This e
nsures that the operating system will never run out of memory and crash. Too muc
h reliance on memory paging can impair performance, however, because random acce
ss memory operates much faster than disk memory. This means the operating system
has to wait for the disk to catch up every time a page is swapped; the more a w
orkload relies on swap files, the more it will negatively impact performance.
In a virtualized environment, the hypervisor manages physical memory. This is be
cause a guest operating system is not aware of the virtualization layer -- it be
lieves it has the host hardware all to itself. Approaches to memory paging in a
virtual environment include:
Smart paging - used only during a VM restart when there is no memory available a
nd none can be reclaimed.
Hypervisor swapping - provides long-term page swap support for a certain amount
of memory reclamation. Because hypervisors generally have no insight into VM me
mory, however, the data swapped out may routinely need to be swapped back which
can degrade performance.
Memory ballooning - forces the VM's guest operating system (OS) to decide which
memory pages are less important and swap them to disk.