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NorfolkEnchants
Contributor
Contributor

Workstation not recognising reserved RAM

Hi,

I'm using Workstation 8.0.5 on a Windows 7 Enterprise host, on which I have 16GB of physical memory installed.

My reserved memory settings in Edit --> Preferences --> Memory is set to 12076MB and I have the 'Allow some virtual machine memory to be swapped' radio button checked.

I'm trying to start a 64-bit CentOS VM image, for which I have set the allocated memory to 8GB.  My host task manager shows I have 10GB of physical memory currently available.

When I try to power on I get the message:

"Not enough physical memory is available to power on this virtual machine with its configured settings.


To fix this problem, decrease the memory size of this virtual machine to 5512 MB, increase the amount of physical memory for all virtual machines to 4233 MB, or adjust the additional memory settings to allow more virtual machine memory to be swapped.

It is possible that native applications and/or services have locked down memory which could be preventing the virtual machine from launching. Shutting down unnecessary applications or services may free enough memory to launch this virtual machine.

Alternatively, do you want to temporarily reduce the memory size of the virtual machine from 8192 MB to 5512 MB?"

So it seems to think I have less than 4233MB available to all VMs, when I have actually set this to about 12GB in the Workstation settings.

Any idea what's going on?

Cheers.

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Scorpion99
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

Make sure that all other VMs are off , adjust the RAM to 5512 Mb as suggested and try.

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NorfolkEnchants
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, that all works fine, and is what I've had to do up to now.

I tried setting the Windows registry entries for PreFetch and SuperFetch, but that didn't seem to help.

I also tried creating a config.ini file with vmmon.disableHostParameters = TRUE which did allow me to start a VM with 8GB of RAM, but then caused a core dump with this message:

2013-03-08T19:46:51.891+11:00| vcpu-0| I120: Msg_Post: Error
2013-03-08T19:46:51.891+11:00| vcpu-0| I120: [msg.log.error.unrecoverable] VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
2013-03-08T19:46:51.891+11:00| vcpu-0| I120+ Unable to allocate locked memory. Aborting the virtual machine.
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da96blan
Contributor
Contributor

Having same issue - see http://communities.vmware.com/message/1998908.

Workaround is to add following into config.ini.

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "FALSE"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "0" 

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VPovarich
Contributor
Contributor

Hi

I had the same issue. Spend a lot of time to fix it to run 2 linux VMs but no luck

but finally found!

Disable or Uninstall Prio. See https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11039 - it was my case. 2nd VM has started to work

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