Ranjna Aggarwal wrote:
is there any kb article on this or any vmware document that defines it clearly.
What do you specific want to know about this?
The key point is that the vmkernel has no way of knowing what kind of memory the balloon driver will consume. It will just send an "order" through VMtools to get the balloon driver inflated to a certain size. The Guest Operating System then has 100% control over where to place this memory demand from this driver.
By that we can not say if the memory is "active" or not, only hope that the internal guest will select the most suitable places for this driver. This would typically mean either empty RAM or less used RAM pages, but if the vmkernel needs a large amount of memory the internal guest could very well be forces to page out important and often used pages.