You definitely want VMware tools installed to get the best performance out of you VM. It is largely a collection of enhanced virtual hardware drivers and also the balloon memory driver. The memory footprint is not that large, you may see it go up and down as the balloon driver inflates and deflates. If you do not want this behaviour (it is good for the ESX server to use it, so it is best not to disable it) you can disable by creating a memory reservation equal to the amount of RAM that the VM has assigned to it. The one feature you do not want installed in ESX which will get installed if you select Complete is the Shared Folders feature which is for Workstation/Server not for ESX. It can cause problems with the OS if you install it with ESX.
Problems with VMware Tools Shared Folders and Windows Server 2003 - http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2006/1/24/1720712.html and http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1317
For more on memory read through these docs...
Memory Resource Management in VMWare ESX Server - http://www.stanford.edu/~stinson/cs240/cs240_1/revs/esx.txt
The Role of Memory in ESX Server 3 - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_memory.pdf
Memory resource management in Vmware ESX Server - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/usenix_resource_mgmt.pdf
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Thanks, Eric
Visit my website: http://vmware-land.com
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Message was edited by:
esiebert7625
