Help - New VC Install - Using to much Memory

[SWCS833]

Hey there.

I just got my ESX Servers up and running yesterday and finally was able to install VC as a VM. In the infrastructure client, I am seeing the VC server using a Host Memory Usage of 3.21 GB and a Guest Memory USage of 1.84 GB. Does this sound right? It seems like it is using to much memory.

The VM is a 1vCPU server, with about 4 GB of RAM. It is connecting to a SQL server that is also a VM, that has SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition installed.

VMWare Tools is installed. Not srue what is going on. This is all brand new, fresh installation of VMs.

[RParker]

Depends on the number of ESX servers, and VM's you have. The memory will go up, but it would have to be around 200 hosts and 2000 VM's to be that high... do you have that many VM's?

[SWCS833]

We have 2 VM and 1 ESX server so far

[jgalexan]

4 gig of memory for a VC VM is a lot. It does seem a little high, but I would watch it for a while to see if it calms down. I currently have 20 host servers and 80 VMs. My VC machine is Virtual with 2vCPU and 2gig Ram. The memory usage on my VC machine does go up and down depending on what is happening. If you plan on doing a lot of P2V work 2 gig would still be enough.

[SWCS833]

It is not doing anything to my knowledge. Maybe it is downloading stuff? I just intalled it a few minutes ago.

[jgalexan]

You have to give it time. If it look high through the GUI or Web Interface, log into the server via RDP and check running processes or current CPU and Mem load.

[SWCS833]

Ok. When I login it is using like 600 MB. I will let it wait.

[SWCS833]

Another question,

I installed Update Manager but I deleted the scheduled task it installed, ooops. How do I get this back?

[Jae_Ellers]

If you have allocated 4GB of RAM to the VM it is your configuration that's causing the server to show the high utilization. Windows will take all of the memory it can access at startup and touch it. Only after there is demand for memory on the ESX server will the balloon drivers kick in and try to recover this.

As others have suggested, look at the memory util. from inside the system and rightsize your vm allocation.

MSSQL will use memory for it's own purposes if available, and it's not unusual to see it at 1.8 GB if there is that much available.

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[dtux101]

Lost my post so reposting...

The guest_mem usage is not an accurate report at all. Basically this guest mem usage is the average working set - meaning the task being executed in the VM when the stats were last updated. When collecting the stat, it will point to the the most memory hungry app inside the guestOS and use this value as the working set. It will only release this stat when memeory is released for another VM's use.

As a test - what happens the guest mem usage figure for your VC server VM if you start another 2 or 3 VMs in quick succession?

[TomHowarth]

As Jae says, windows touches all its available memory on startup and keeps it, it is a jealous beast. personally I would reduce your VC guests memory footprint to about 2Gb, until you need it, according to your earlier replies you have checked your memory in the guest and found it to be using 600MB. this suggests memory bloat to me. remember part of the virtualisatio journey is to consolidate servers and get more utilisation our of resource. give your guests what they really need not what you would have given them if they were a phisical machine because it is cheaper to to buy 4Gb of memory when you buy the tin than upgrade it later.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator