Slow booting VMs with large memory

[Full_Halsey]

It seems my VMs take longer to boot as I increase the memory. It seems that once I hit 4GB or higher, the boot time starts geting very long. Has anyone seen this? Know of a work around?

I'm using ESX 3.5 upgrade 1 and the VMs are Windows 2003. The VMs reside on an EMC DMX SAN using 4GB fiber.

[weinstein5]

out of curiosity how much memory does your ESX host have?

[kukacz · Accepted solution]

I haven't met this problem yet. However, I would try to check if the problem is not related to your storage. By default, each VM creates a swap file in the same place, where its vmdk and configuration files reside. To avoid such swapping, you need to maximize the memory reservation limit in the VM properties. You should shut down the VM and start it again to see the effect.

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Lukas Kubin

Message was edited by: kukacz

[Full_Halsey]

All my hosts have 64GB of RAM or more. I don't have any host with more than 30GB allocated from VMs. My highest memory utilization is 36% on any host.

[Full_Halsey]

This got it. I normally don't reserve any memory, but it definitely made a difference. I took a VM with 4GB of RAM, placed a 2GB reservation on it, and it booted much quicker. I have done several reboots and they are as fast as I would expect them to be. I still feel 2GB is the magic number. Past that I see things getting slower. This will be something I try from now on to get boot times where they need to be.

Thanks kukacz.

[kukacz]

Glad to help, but it was just a shot. Still the problem doesn't give much sense to me. I suggest you open a support case with VMware.

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Lukas Kubin