I started to use VMWare Server I many years ago. First I was running mainly VM’s for development purposes. Then I felled so in love with that concept, that I virtualize almost everything. Web-Server, Oracle-(Dev)DB, VSS-Server, lots of different development environments, even my mailing is completely virtualized. The big benefit from my point of view is, you don’t have to reinstall everything when your machine changes.

Now, with the increasing numbers of VM’s, I reached very soon the 4GB barrier and found myself forced to switch to a 64Bit server version. I have been very lucky with using a plain vanilla XP as a OS for VMWare Server I. Because of that experience (using a desktop OS), I thought I give W7-64 a try. I was (and still I am) very impressed with the stability of that OS. No issues, not even to speak from a crash or anything else. Along with the switch from XP to W7 I was forced to switch from VMWare Server I to version II, because I refused to install under W7.

Btw., the reason why I’m not using any Linux is simply because I (mis)use the server itself as a TV server, hosting a DVB (Sat) card and running my favorite (for that purpose) software DVBViewer on it, which is only available for the WinOS.

Now, that installation was running for a year or so – once again – with no issues. Just for the hack (and against all ‘never touch …’ advises), I thought I give Win2008 R2 (180 days trial) a try.

I knew that there where some issues with BDA support (for using my DVB card) but I was able to sort them out in a test installation. So I moved on, spent my server (Gigabyte, Intel i3) a bit more RAM (12GB now) and installed VMWare Server II on it, imported all my VM’s (at the present there 18 of them, but I run only max. 12 at the same time, the others are paused). At the beginning, everything seamed to be fine, usual stability (after all, W2008 is a sibling of W7). But after a while I noticed something strange behavior. The trouble starts, when I put some VM’s to sleep - like I do with some of my Dev-Environments (which are the biggest memory consumers) over the weekend. When I start the up on Monday morning, all VM’s are getting very sluggish. Even worse, after pausing, I can’t fit the same VM’s into the memory anymore. Shutting down all VM’s leaves the OS with a lot of memory still occupied (more than 6GB), from what I can tell it is not cache (judging from ProcessExplorer). The only thing that helps is, to bounce the server entirely, starting with a initial consumtion of under one GB of RAM and allowing me to fit all the VM’s back in memory. From then on (till next weekend) they feel very vital.

Host settings are of course ‘Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM’.

Has anyone a hint on that issue?