Running ESXi 4.1 with less than 2GB of ram

[caddo]

Hi everyone,

i remember back with 4.0 it was possible, once installed, to lower the minimum required ram to a custom value.

It's interesting for testing purpose when i want to make test in my laptop with 4 GB of ram i used to be able to run a vCenter instance, 2 esxi hosts and a virtual storage appliance to test DRS vMotion and such. Now this is not possible because 2 gigs are taken by a single esxi instance.

I can't seem to find information about how to do this on vSphere 4.1. It would be ok if i could do it with ESX too.

Please point me to a way to do that if you know something. Thank you!

[AndreTheGiant]

In any case you will some trouble with only 4 GB.

The vCenter require at least 3 GB RAM (although with little more that 2 can work).

And ESXi, in any case require more than 1 GB each.

Andre

[a_p_]

The memory requirement increased a bit.

see http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_esxi_i_vc_setup_guide.pdf

2GB RAM minimum. For upgrades, 3GB RAM is required if the ESXi host is managed by vCenter Server

There are other discussions about issues with activating HA with less then ~2.3GB RAM.

André

[caddo]

vCenter need 3 GB in production environment but i can assure you i run it with 1 GB of ram in test environment just fine.

Too bad there is no way to run esxi with less than 2GB.

Thanks anyway.

[a_p_]

Well, you could try to run this setup anyway. Make sure the memory preferences in VMware Workstation are set to "Allow some/most virtual machine memory to be swapped". This way you can overcommit memory.

André