vCenter App memory usage in home test environment

[guywood]

Hello all,

First post of mine so please bear with me.  I have recently taken the vSphere 5.1 ICM course and am studying for the VCP exam.

My test environment is on my PC which is 4ghz 6 core AMD with 16GB Ram.

Using Workstation 9, I have a nested ESXi host with 10GB of allocated RAM solely running the vCenter App.  I also have another host with a test Window Server VM.

I noticed that this host was nearly maxing out its memory usage when just sat idle (ie just monitoring performance charts through vCenter web client).  Please see the screenshots.

As you can see... the host is running at 88% memory usage not doing anything whilst the actual app is only fluctuating between 15 and 20%.  My other host which isn't really doing anything flat lines at 9% memory usage with exactly the same allocation.  My worry is that if the vCenter App was being used (even just lightly) then the host wouldn't have enough memory for it.

SOOOOO MY QUESTION IS - is this normal?  By my calculations vCenter is taking up 80% of 10GB's worth of resource making that 8GB whilst not even doing anything.  VMWare recommends 4GB for vCenter App so I assumed it would run at 100% of that but it seems to be double for my environment.  So again, is that normal?  I have never worked with vCenter before so have no basis for comparison.

PS.  None of this really matters and is all for my own learning but any advice would be appreciated.

[a_p_]

I guess the high memory usage is due to VMware Workstation not being able to reclaim unused memory from a virtual ESXi host (e.g. through ballooning). I'm running vCenter Server as a virtual machine directly on VMware Workstation in my lab, which works perfectly.

André

[guywood]

Hmmm I might try that instead which would be more efficient.  Not sure if I can do that with the vCenter App or if I have to use Win Server?

Andre - what resources do you allocate to that VM?

[a_p_]

I tested both, the vCenter Server Appliance as well as the Windows based vCenter Server this way and both are working as expected. Since I also only have 16GB memory installed on the host, I reduced the provisioned memory for vCenter Server to 4GB (although in some cases it might require more than this to run smoothly).

André