ESXi using ~2GB of RAM without any VMs?

[vanberge]

I've been troubleshooting this for awhile now and trying to see if anyone might have any ideas...

I have a test server (2.5 GB of ram, 3 GHz intel p4) and I've successfully gotten ESXi intalled. I also have created 3 Virtual machines one at a time. Each one runs windows server 2003 and has 256 megs of ram assigned.

So, now that I've gotten this far I cannot even start all three servers at the same time do to memory being over allocated.

I did a fresh restart of the esxi server and have noticed that it is using almost 2 GB of ram before I even power on any VMs ??

Any idea what causes this? I have a separate esxi test server with very similar conifguration and it uses 2-300 MB of ram at first boot up before I power on the VMs. Thanks in advance!!!

[vanberge]

I also just went and disabled every reservation I could find...

Still at boot, ESXi consumes 1.7 gigs of my ram... this is without booting any of my 3 VMs

Stinks!

[amirs]

ESXi claims ~1.6 Gigs at boot up time. If you are running any third-party solutions, like HP or Dell cusotmizations, this footprint increases depending on the server vendor's implementation. This memory footprint is partially due to the maximum configurations that ESXi can support on any server, assuming very robust underlying HW (most customers have 32-128 Gigs of memory per server). A 2 Gig server supports 1-2 VMs. The best minimal configuraiton is 4 Gigs.

In most configurations, servers are memory bound (and not CPU or I/O bound, even with 64 GB on the server). Memory is relatively inexpensive, so adding more to your server will allow you to better harness ther server's CPU and I/O capabilities.

At some point int he future, ESXi may size its memory reserve with HW capabilties as a consideration.

[vanberge]

Hmm... ok, thx for the info. But is it possible to decrease that memory footprint?

Its just a small test server so I dont care to add more ram - just curious as to why another server with a similar conifguration is only using 300 megs.

I may try reinstlaling esx to see what happens there.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

What numbers do you have on Configuration \ Memory and for memory on the Resource Allocation tab?

[vanberge]

I will double check in just a second but I'm pretty sure that tab said 0% memory allocated / 600 MB reserved

[vanberge]

Corrections

Memory Reservation: 614MB

Memory Reservation Used: 0 MB

Memory Unreserved: 614 MB

[vanberge]

Previous Post is Resource allocation tab... Here is Configuration/memory.

Total 2549.5

System -- {two dashes}

Virtual Machines 947 MB

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

Take a look at this thread - http://communities.vmware.com/message/1121905.

[vanberge]

Tyvm Dave... Apparently you are just the man on these forums.