VMware ballooning state from inside guest

There's tools (e.g. extop) to check VMware ballooning state from VMware host.

I'm using VMware to run CentOS 6.3 and when ballooning stars consume memory to reclaim it back to ESX host, my system behaves not nicely under the stress.

Is there way to see the ballooning state from inside guest system?

Install the VMware tools and use

vmware-toolbox-cmd stat balloon

or

cat /proc/vmmemctl

to check.

With recent Linux kernel module vmw_balloon, vmmemctl has moved to debugfs. You have to mount it (if not already done, like on Ubuntu) to check memory target and current values in pages:

lsmod | grep balloon
vmw_balloon            12542  0
mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug
cat /sys/kernel/debug/vmmemctl