Uses for loads of RAM

[M4T]

Hi,

What is a good use for loads of RAM? i have about 16 M820 blades with 380GB ram each and quad 8 core cpu's. i've noticed on windows 10 pro you can only have 2 sockets on the vm not 4. but what's a good use for loads of ram? i think the windows 10 pro vm only accepts 128GB of ram i think.

Matt

[bluefirestorm · Accepted solution]

Windows 10 Professional is limited to 2 CPU sockets (both on physical and virtual machine). I cannot find an official Microsoft document but as far as I can remember, even going back to Windows 2000 Professional the cap was with 2 physical socket CPU. You could have a 4 socket CPU machine but it will only recognise 2.

As for memory, Windows 10 x64 Professional is capped at 2TB RAM maximum. The 128GB is for the Windows 10 x64 Home.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limi...

But of course, the lesser of the limit imposed by ESXi and VM hardware compatibility is also another limit to consider.

Limits of ESXi 6.5

https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere6/r65/vsphere-65-configuration-maximums.pdf#page=9&zoom=auto,-220,...

Limits of hardware compatibility

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014006

Use of loads of RAM in the ESXi host would be to have as many VM guests as it can accommodate.

Use of loads of RAM in a VM such as a Windows 10; the usual suspect would be editing of UHD or even 8K videos/photos. Sorry to throw in a jargon, big data crunching. But usually data crunching that places loads of data inside RAM instead of disk might highly specialised/customised (e.g. ocean wave simulation, earthquake pattern/predictions, weather modelling predictions) to ensure that it really load the data into RAM instead of reading off disks. There could be more in the realm of scientific and mathematical calculations; for example, there could be a computation of data matrices that have millions of rows and millions of columns.

[M4T]

hi bluefirestorm,

would a good use of loads of ram be GIS say autocad MAP 3D? assuming it doesn't need GPU as well as. as blade servers on a m1000e cant have GPU's 

Matt

[bluefirestorm]

AutoCAD applications will likely be good candidates for Windows 10 VM with high RAM. Most AutoCAD applications benefit from more RAM than more CPU; but you will need to check the DX requirements. But I don't think AutoCAD has dropped support for DX9 (yet).

Other candidates for a high RAM Windows 10 desktop VM would be a software developer/build workstation. Aside to use it to host the developer IDE and build environment to do project compile/builds; it also has the potential for a developer to use nested VMs inside (e.g. running VMware Workstation inside to have its simulated deployment environment for the application being developed/maintained for debugging purposes).

I must add the big data/scientific/mathematical applications also have a tendency these days to go with GPU computing; so that is also the part where it can be highly specialised/customised as it could be using OpenCL or using Nvidia CUDA. So a GPU passthrough to the VM would then be required but high VM RAM does not become a necessity.

It is amazing that the Hubble Space Telescope only has an Intel 80486 CPU (it was upgraded during a space shuttle mission spacewalk from an Intel 80386 CPU) and the typical PC/laptop computer at home or even a smartphone has more raw processing power.