How to find if a balloon driver is enabled on Virtual Machines on a VMware host

1. Open ssh connection to the host.

NOTE: you will have to enable the SSH service by connecting to the host in vsphere client. Go to configuration>security profile> services 'properties' > select SSH and click on options> start.

 

2. After logging in, type in the command esxtop, by default vmware displays CPU attributes.

 3.  By press 'm' to switch to memory view.

  4. We are looking for the MCTL attribute which might not be in the list of attributes being displayed, so press 'f' to edit the list of attributes being displayed.

  5. You can toggle the field to show or not by pressing the corresponding letter. Like in this case, press 'j' to display the MSTL attribute 
6. The MCTL attribute will show 'y' if the balloon driver is enabled.