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Alph4d0g
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VM Memory usage after migration from 3.5

Hi there,

yesterday I have migrated our ESX 3.5u4 servers to 4.0

now we could see that the VM's need much more memory than they needed before

e.g.

The VM called "Auftra" (w2k3 EE SP2)

Host Memory : 1017 MB

Guest Memory : 972 MB

Memory usage shown in windows: 572 MB

Same thing on other Windows an Linux VMs ...

VMware tools are updated and running -.-

does anyone know if this is normal ??

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ealaqqad
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Hi Alph4d0g,

I have documented this issue & the solution on my blog at the following post:

Guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on VMware ESX 4

I hope this help some one, if it does please reward points.

Enjoy,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

System X & Storage Technical Specialist

Founder of http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com

Regards, Eiad Al-Aqqad Technology Consultant @ VMware b: http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com b: http://www.TSMGuru.com

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MKguy
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Have you installed patches for ESX4, or updated to ESX4 U1? An issue with the displayed memory usage of VMs was fixed by a patch around autumn last year.

See this thread: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1262802

Also, are you running Nehalem servers? TPS won't be as effective because it takes NUMA boundaries into consideration and because ESX4 uses large pages by default, which can seldomly be deduplicated. If you really want to reap maximum TPS benefits, you might want to set the advanced parameter mem.allocguestlargepage to 0.

-- http://alpacapowered.wordpress.com
Alph4d0g
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We're actually running ESX4.0 in test-mode because our licences havent arrived yet ...

don't know if our CPU's are nehalems Xeon 5530 Quad Core 2,4 Ghz

Is there any way to get the Update .01 without having an active license ?

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MKguy
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Just download the most recent ESX4 U1 ISO and install from scratch if you are just testing. I even wonder why you didn't to this to begin with and installed 4.0 RC.

Besides that, there is an ESX host update utilitly in the new vSphere Client, esxupdate from the ServiceConsole; and your hosts will run for 60 days in eval mode with all features enabled.

If your CPUs are Xeon 55xx, then yes, these are Nehalem CPUs.

-- http://alpacapowered.wordpress.com
Alph4d0g
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host update utility of the vsphere client doesnt work ...

and now if anyone could tell me what TPM and NUMA is i would be thankful :smileygrin:

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MKguy
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If you had read the thread I linked earlier, you would know what TPS is. Transparent Page Sharing deduplicates identical memory pages of VMs on a host, which allows for great saving in the host memory usage department; thus allowing memory overcommit without impacting performance.

NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) is the new CPU/Memory architecture introduced by Intel Nehalem and in previous AMD CPUs. Google is your friend etc.

Heres also a great article that explains NUMA stuff: http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/02/sizing-vms-and-numa-nodes/

Just install a new server with the recent U1 ISO or use esxupdate from the service console if the host update utility doesn't work.

-- http://alpacapowered.wordpress.com
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ealaqqad
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Hi Alph4d0g,

I have documented this issue & the solution on my blog at the following post:

Guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on VMware ESX 4

I hope this help some one, if it does please reward points.

Enjoy,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

System X & Storage Technical Specialist

Founder of http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com

Regards, Eiad Al-Aqqad Technology Consultant @ VMware b: http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com b: http://www.TSMGuru.com
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Alph4d0g
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thank you very much, I'll read your blog if I could find some free time Smiley Wink

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