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miyo360
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

cannot 'reserve all guest memory' - cannot satisfy failover for HA

Hi,

I have a 3-host cluster running ESXI 5.1. Each host has 96GB of memory and around 5-6 running vm's. Each host is showing memory usage around 40%. I have an Exchange 2013 server which is reporting 'memory allocation failures' that are causing databases to go offline momentarily. The full error is

Information Store - MailDB4 (8096) MailDB4: The system is experiencing memory allocation failures that are preventing proper operation of database 'MailDB4' ('777d4e3c-d5fd-4a65-93cf-bdb12ca9e4d2').  The error could occur due to a mis-configuration or excessive memory consumption on the machine.

Additional diagnostic information:  cc95a8ab-7b96-45e2-bcad-9da4323e74b0

This VM has been given 12GB of memory and supports around 50 active mailboxes. I would like to reserve all guest memory for the vm, to ensure the host does not interfere. This is my first attempt at tackling the errors above. However, when I attempt to reserve the memory, I get the error

Insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover level for vSphere HA.

My HA settings allow for 1 host failure in the cluster. The cluster total memory is 287GB. If a host fails, then approx 196GB is available in the cluster. Counting used space shows all vm's are consuming around 107GB, so there is plenty of memory available in the event of a single host failure. Therefore I'm not sure why I am seeing the error above when trying to reserve memory for this vm.

What I have done now is create a new resource pool for just this server, reserve over 12GB for that pool, then I have added the vm to that pool, which seems happy. I presume this achieves the same result? Time will tell whether it will resolve the Exchange errors above though.

Thoughts and comments appreciated.