Today, I wanted to mess around with a thing called vbaloon. It’s some kind of driver thingy, sounds complicated, but it’s actually not that bad. So, I started by, you know, getting this driver ready on my computer.
First, I got this VirtIO stuff from their website. I downloaded the ISO image. Then, I opened up my virtual machine settings in this program called VMware. I went to the CD/DVD settings and pointed it to that ISO image I just downloaded. Booted up the VM, nothing fancy there.
Once the VM was running, I went into the Device Manager. I saw this thing with a yellow exclamation mark, probably the vbaloon thing. I right-clicked it and picked “Update driver”. I chose to browse my computer for drivers and went straight to the CD drive where the VirtIO ISO was mounted. I made sure to check the box that says “Include subfolders” ’cause I wanted it to search everywhere in there.
Clicked “Next” and it started doing its thing, installing the driver. Took a few seconds, maybe a minute. When it finished, it said the driver was successfully installed. Nice! I checked the Device Manager again, and the yellow mark was gone. The thing was now called “VirtIO Balloon Driver”. So, I guess it worked.
After that, I wanted to see if it actually did anything, so I opened up Task Manager. There’s this tab called “Performance” where you can see the memory usage and stuff. I messed around in the VM, opened some programs, closed some, just to see if the memory usage changed. And it did! It went up and down like it should. Pretty cool.
So yeah, that’s about it. Got the vbaloon driver installed and it seemed to work. Wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Just a few clicks here and there and bam, it’s working.
In my case, I did these steps:
- Download VirtIO Drivers ISO
- Add the ISO to VM in VMware
- Boot up VM
- Update the driver in device manager
- Check memory usage in Task Manager
- Done!
Maybe you guys can try this too, it is easy and fun!