ESX 3.5 Service Console Memory

[scotty_p]

I'm running an ESX 3.5 server and it has 800MB memory allocated to the service console. We use IPMonitor to monitor our servers and it has been using 750MB consistently for a while now. Is there a need to upgrade the memory for the service console? Can this cause performance issues?

Thanks,

Scott

[mcowger]

Depends on what, exactly, you are monitoring. Linux does interesting thing with memory that can piss off monitoring systems that aren't advanced enough to understand it.

Either way, 800MB is the max

In the service console, what does 'free -m' show?

--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[scotty_p]

Thanks for the response.

Here's the output of free -m. It looks like it actually is using most of the memory. Is 800 the max you can give the service console?

# free -m

total used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 781 754 26 0 133 321

-/+ buffers/cache: 300 480

Swap: 1600 0 1600

[dickybird]

yes its 800M max

We have found that running HP insight agents for vmware takes up some memory, if using HP hardware

Also see if you are running any other programs than vanilla ESX O/S. They might be eating up in your memory.

[mcowger · Accepted solution]

Actually, the important line is the +/- cache line, which shows that you have 480MB free. You are golden and good to go.

Basically linux (which the service console is) will use 'extra' memory for caching, leading many monitoring programs to believe that you only have 26MB free in this case. Recommend you find a monitoring program that is more intelligent.

--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[scotty_p]

OK. Thanks. I'll do some digging.