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2 Replies Last post: May 25, 2007 6:07 AM by Oli L
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8Gb of memory assigned to VM but not showing up in OS

May 25, 2007 3:08 AM

Click to view Oli L's profile Enthusiast Oli L 82 posts since
Aug 1, 2006
I have assigned 8GB of memory to a virtual machine.

The VM OS is Windows 2003 Ent SP2
ESX 3.0.1 latest patches 44686

The OS is only showing 3.75GB of RAM

I have checked the config maximums for both Windows and ESX

Windows 2003 ent: maximum: 32 GB for x86-based PCs with the 32-bit version
Virtual Machine maximum for ESX 3 Infrastructure: Size of RAM per virtual machine 16384MB

Is there any configuration I need to do or am I missing something, ie "a bug" ;-)

Many thanks
Reply Re: 8Gb of memory assigned to VM but not showing up in OS May 25, 2007 3:57 AM
Click to view peetz's profile Expert peetz 239 posts since
Sep 25, 2004
Check if Windows uses the PAE extension inside the VM.
If you look at "System Properties / General" you should be able to read "Physical Address Extension" as last line in the Computer-section.
Without PAE Windows 2003 (32-bit) will only address 4 GB of memory.

You can force the usage of PAE by adding /PAE to C:\BOOT.INI like here:
[code]
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Enterprise" /fastdetect /pae
[/code]

And - next time - please mark your post as a question (if it is a question like this one) so that you can reward points for helpful or correct answers.

Regards
Andreas
Reply Re: 8Gb of memory assigned to VM but not showing up in OS May 25, 2007 6:07 AM
in response to: peetz
Click to view Oli L's profile Enthusiast Oli L 82 posts since
Aug 1, 2006
thanks - that did the trick

Will change my question next time!
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