ESXi reports less memory than reality

[dragin33]

I have a Dell 6600 Server with 4GB of memory however ESXi when installed only reports 3.5GB. It also shows an orange light over the memory section but I have no idea why. The memory itself is fine. Any reasons why it would reporting less RAM than I actually have?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your post has been moved to the ESXi forum

Dave Mishchenko

VMware Communities User Moderator

Is that on the Configuration \ Health Status that is showing the orange light? How much memory does the BIOS report? You might want to run a memory test with something like this - http://www.memtest.org/.

[khughes]

Is the orange light on the physical server itself? If so you might have a memory problem that you just don't know about. It only registers 3.5 because the service console takes around 300MB for its use.

• Kyle

[dragin33]

no the server is fine and when I run a memory testser on the server everything is fine. The orange light is within ESX manager. The server should show (at the local console) how much total memory I have (4GB not 3.5) but it's not.

[dragin33]

I still have not figured this one out but I recently had another situation that got me thinking...

I recently got a computer with 6GB of memory and to my surprise Windows Vista would not support more than 4GB! I was perplexed that such a new OS would not support only 6GB. Then i found out that any 32bit OS cannot address more than 4GB of memory without some special PAE extentions in the kernel. So I got the Vista 64bit version and that works like a charm. Also, Searching google I found out a lot of people had this problem with XP where they would only see 3-3.5GB of their total 4GB of memory.

Now, this might be a dumb question but are there any similarities in this situation? Is ESXi 32bit? And is it automagically setup to support more than 4GB of RAM? Just a thought..

Please help my ESX server with 4GB of RAM is still only showing 3.5!

Thank You

[nemrtvy]

Hi, have you managed to find out what was the problem? I have Poweredge 6650 server with 8GB of RAM and ESXi is showing only 3.5GB from 8GB.

I would appreciate any help on this issue.

Thanks you.

Fero

[GeneGiannamore]

I am able to get my ESXi 3.5U3 installation to report 3.7GB on the console. the infrastructure client now reports 3803.8MB. I did the following to achieve this, in the Intel 865glc mobo bios, I disabled the ISA bit, disable anything not needed (serial, parrallel, asf, audio), set the agp apeture to 4mb (default was 128mb), frame buffer size to 1mb. The agp size had the biggest impact on available memory. It must have something to do with memory mapping of device I/O or something like that.

[Phoenixke]

Basically, this is a restriction for all 32-bit OSs... 4GB is supported but this is the limit. So your system will take a bite out of it, shared memory for your GPU will take a bite.

This is the reason you can up the memory counted by lowering your agp aperture...

Go for 64 bit or read up on MickySoft