VMware Workstation does not use all my host RAM in Ubuntu

[mikeydluffy]

Hi,

I am using VMware Workstation Pro on Ubuntu to do some penetration testing courses.

For some reason VMware Workstation only uses half of my host machine RAM.

So my laptop running VMware Workstation has 8GB of RAM. I have a Windows Server 2008R2 Server (1GB), Windows Server 2012R2 (2GB), Windows 7 (1GB), Windows 8.1 (1GB) and Kali Linux (2GB). For some odd reason with all the VMs running the amount of resources it uses on my host machine is capped at 3.7GiB which is roughly 49% of the host and uses about 10% of Swap. I tried changing the host OS swappiness but that didn't work. I am stuck with VMware Workstation application only using half my RAM

Has anyone had this problem?

Kind regards

Mike

[RDPetruska]

Sounds like a limitation of a 32-bit process.  Not sure why that would be though.

Do realize that your host needs some RAM and CPU resources to run its own processes besides VMware processes - so you won't want to allocate all of the CPUs and/or RAM to your running VMs.

[dariusd]

You might want to review the Workstation Pro Memory Preference Settings​ and see if they need to be adjusted for your requirements.

Thanks,

--

Darius

[mikeydluffy]

I have looked there. My reserved memory is set to 6888MB which is my maximum.

The Additional Memory is set to "Allow some virtual machine memory to be swapped" although when I changed to "Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM", my memory usage went to 99% and everything grinded to a halt due to no RAM left on the host.

You would think the "allow some" option would go higher than 50% of the RAM before moving to Swap. The "fit all" option sounds like it would not use swap at all.

So I have the option of 50% RAM and everything else swap or 100% RAM and not swap.

Mike