Quick & dirty post: If you ever need to demonstrate ESXi 5’s new swapping to host cache feature, I’ve found the easiest way to do that is to create two VMs that over-commit the host memory (and have very little disk allotted). You can power on the VMs, open up each VM’s console and boot to a memtest86 iso. Your VMs should fight over the host memory nicely. 🙂
From there, go to the host’s Performance tab and create a new custom advanced performance chart. You’ll find all of the “swap to host cache” counters under memory. (Which makes sense, but naturally, was the last place I looked after System, Datastore, Disk.)
That’s all there is to it!
