"Unballooning" RAM that's been ballooned by VMware

Solution 1:

VMware actually has a KB article that has this information:

To force the balloon driver to release its hold on memory and prevent the guest operating system from using swap space, use one of these options:

  • Set the value of sched.mem.max to the allocated memory or greater.
  • Select the virtual machine's Resources > Memory > Limit > Unlimited box.
  • Migrate the virtual machine to another host.