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jokken1
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confused on available memory after an upgrade to ESXi 5.1

hi noobie question here

after an upgrade to ESXi5.1 (wiped ESXi5.0 and installed 5.1 fresh and imported 2 previous VM s) I can no longer start both VMs when they use 3GB RAM each. In ESXi5.0 it worked.

I need to reduce to 2.6GB RAM for each VM. The one concerning thing I see is that "Total Capacity" is 5.7GB while the system has 8GB RAM. Please see attached picture (I don't know what "Total Capacity" read in ESXi5.0, so I can't compare)

I understand ESXi5.1 needs some overhead and that each VM needs some overhead but I still expect another 1.5GB RAM to be available for my VMs.

8185 (Capacity)

-2660-2640 (two VMs)

-231-194 (overhead for 2 VMs)

=2460

does that mean ESXi5.1 is using 2.4GB RAM to run 2 VMs? The picture shows 984MB in use without the VMs are started. So starting 2 VMs cause ESXi5.1 to use 1.4GB more RAM?

If so what screen would show that? I'm sure it is me that is missing something, but please explain.

thanks

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zXi_Gamer
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Yup.. somewhere down the line, the ESXi5.1 host memory usage has been spiked up~2GB. In my system of 32GB, I can use only 26GB Smiley Sad

But again, there are a few tweaks to release some 500MB in the configuration of system resource allocation tab. You can  have a shot at it. But i wouldnt recommend it.

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zXi_Gamer
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Yup.. somewhere down the line, the ESXi5.1 host memory usage has been spiked up~2GB. In my system of 32GB, I can use only 26GB Smiley Sad

But again, there are a few tweaks to release some 500MB in the configuration of system resource allocation tab. You can  have a shot at it. But i wouldnt recommend it.

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jokken1
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thanks zXi_Gamer.

I guess I'll just have to put in some more RAM. I went back to ESXi50 on another hard drive and it came up as "Total Capacity" 5.9GB. That must have been enough to get by before.

I did note that if I move the VMs swapfile out to a network location "Total Capacity" went up 300MB. I don't think that is good for performance though. Plus 300MB is peanuts if I was running this on a real server built with RAM for a real VM deployment...