DOCS-4037

Author: Michael Paik

source/administration/production-notes.txt

@@ -610,9 +610,18 @@ should set ``tcp_keepalive_time`` to 120 to ameliorate this problem.
 VMWare
 ``````
 
-MongoDB is compatible with VMWare. As some users have
-run into issues with VMWare's memory overcommit feature,
-disabling the feature is recommended.
+MongoDB is compatible with VMWare.
+
+As some users have run into issues with VMWare's memory overcommit
+feature, you should disable the feature.
+
+Further, MongoDB is known to run poorly with VMWare's balloon driver
+(``vmmemctl``), so you should disable this as well. VMWare uses the
+balloon driver to reduce physical memory usage on the host hardware by
+allowing the hypervisor to swap to disk while hiding this fact from
+the guest, which continues to see the same amount of (virtual)
+physical memory. This interferes with MongoDB's memory management,
+and you are likely to experience significant performance degradation.
 
 It is possible to clone a virtual machine running MongoDB.
 You might use this function to