Vmware memory sizing

[markotsg]

Hello

I would like to know you thoughts on the best way of analysing memory usage and determining the correct memory size for vm.

Some people tend to use average consumed memory for past week and give vm this much ram, some prefer max active whcih is much lower value.

Any advice would be appreciated

regads

Mark

[vmroyale]

Hello and welcome to the communities.

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to Enterprise Strategy & Planning

For me, it seems like almost every case is different. It depends on who the customer (or what the workload) is a lot of the time. That said, I still tend to be pretty conservative with memory growth. I don't recall ever "getting back" memory.

[vTagion]

I agree with royale. Rarely rarely rarely do you ever get memory back... LET ME REPEAT! IN ALL REALITY YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR RAM AGAIN once you provision it out. Be very conservative because you can always provision more RAM later. You really just need to know your environment and your applications. Depending on your corporation and your environment you don't need to follow (and shouldn't completely follow) what the "box" says your applications need. You should know roughly what they need.

If you are willing to pay for it, Capacity Planner is a great tool to use if you already have a partially virtualized environment. Running Capacity Planner for roughly 1 month should give you what you need to know. If you don't use Capacity Planner then what I guess I'm saying is:

1. Be conservative

2. Monitor monitor monitor your environment. You may spend some time adjusting your VMs, but that is ok.

Hope this helps!