Disk activity issue...

[Erich Weiler <bitscrubber@gmail.com>]

I've got this issue that I've been banging my head against a wall for a 
while over and I think another pair of eyes may help, if anyone have a 
moment.  We have this new-ish KVM VM server (with the latest CentOS 5.5 
updates, kmod-kvm-83-164.el5_5.25) that houses 3 VMs.  It works mostly 
as expected except it has a very high load all the time, like 40-60, 
when the VMs are running.  I suspect it has to do with memory 
management, because when all 3 VMs are online, they should consume 5GB 
RAM on the VM server and they only consume like 2GB, so I think the rest 
of the RAM is swapping or something, because the disks are spinning at 
100% all the time (even when the VMs are doing nothing).  Although, the 
VM server does not report any swapping happening. When I shut down the 
VMs one by one, the load drops and so does the disk activity.  I don't 
think I set this server up with anything out of the ordinary...  I've 
tried rebooting, but the same thing happens immediately upon reboot. 
Google searches, for me at least, yielded nothing useful.

Anyone heard of this kind of thing happening?

-erich