I'm covering VM in my Computer Architecture lectures at the moment so I must recommend the following sample chapter to my students - System Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition: Chapter 4: Memory:

In this chapter, I'll describe how memory is physically implemented, the mechanics of how the system manages memory, and how paging and swapping function at a system level. I'll give you some tools you can use to analyze your memory use, and explain how to work with swap space. Finally, I'll cover mechanisms to address some common memory performance problems.