Am looking for updated guidance on fine tuning memory allocation to VMs on the Host.
I was able to locate the following existing documents
Fine Tuning Host memory
http://faq.sanbarrow.com/index.php?action=artikel&cat=78&id=76&artlang=en
Fine Tuning Guest memory
http://faq.sanbarrow.com/index.php?action=artikel&cat=78&id=78&artlang=en
The problem I first observed on Win8 but has become a much greater problem in Win10 (running Workstation 11)
is that the Windows Host seems to need excessively large amounts of memory and increases over time. If I have a number of Guests running (5 machines using all pre-allocated memory in the Host settings), there will still come a point where either the machines suffer or any activity on the Host suffers. When this actual point arrives seems to be related to the amount of activity in the Guests and/or the Host. Even simply opening the Edge browser in Windows can be enough to freeze the system.
Am currently speculating that a contributing factor is the <type> of Windows app running. In both Win8 and Win10 I strongly believe based purely on observation that the resources for the RT and legacy "Desktop" environments are not managed under a single set of tools... It looks to me that if either the RT or Desktop environments are running but not the other, then they have 100% of the resources, but when an app from each environment is run then instead of allocating as many resources as necessary to each app, the entire system's resources are split 50/50 before each app is run. This means for example if I were to run only one RT app like EDGE (The Win10 web browser), then available system resources to VMware is automatically cut in half.
In Win8, this was somewhat manageable since it was extremely clear when apps were launched from a tile (typically an RT app) or from within the Desktop.
But, with Win10, RT apps are launched in a Desktop window so it's not so easy to always avoid RT apps.
To a degree, what I described above is not conclusively verifiable because no Windows tool I know of displays resources used in each environment (RT and Desktop). Tools like Task Manager and Resource monitor only display total system metrics.
Win10 may also be more aggressive in utilizing all available memory (typical for all modern OS) and may not be respecting VMware settings, but I'm still verifying that.
Any comment, discussion or recommendation?
Thx.
