Use of Resource Pools in Vcenter 2.5 update 3

[LarryW46]

VMware support folks stated that the use of Resource Pools was the culprit causing W2K3 severs to expand page file to max and freeze.

You could actually watch the page file grow if anything happened on the ESX Host.

Tech gave no real reason why....... just suggested that we try.

Moved the server out of pool problem gone.

Our use of pools similar to OU in AD .... a means to organize servers and allow users to be admins of their servers.

Vcenter is W2K3 R2 SP2 2 procs, 4 GB RAM. ... SQL DB on a remote SQL Enterprise server.

currently have 92 servers with 15 resource pools.

Have never used folders..... would that accomplish same thing...

[weinstein5]

You can use folders to delegate administrative control but you will not be able to carve out the resources from the parent ESX Server or the Cluster - for a better understanding of what you gain and can do with resource pools above and beyond delegating administrative control check out particularly section 3

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[BenConrad]

"VMware support folks stated that the use of Resource Pools was the culprit causing W2K3 severs to expand page file to max and freeze"

I'm not sure if that's a known issue however it does sound like a similar issue I've had where the memory resource setting on VMs gets unset from 'Unlimited' or the Limit is less than the amount of memory assigned to the guest. Either one of these issues causes the Page File usage in the guests to go very high (ex: 1.5GB on a 'base' vm).

Ben

[RParker]

VMware support folks stated that the use of Resource Pools was the culprit causing W2K3 severs to expand page file to max and freeze.

NOT TRUE. Resource pools have NOTHING at all to do with HOW an OS is run under VM Ware. It ONLY allocates resources to a group, period. You put 10 VM's in a group, and you only give 1GB of RAM to that group, ALL 10 VM's share the SAME RAM, period. That's the ONLY difference between resource pools and free VM's (not assigned to a group).

Your OS freezing is probably the result of mismanagement or OS maintenance neglect (not routinely repairing registry, defrag, updates, etc...). That's what causes freezing. Expanding the Page file, is by design. Page files are used even if you only use 500 Meg of RAM in a VM allocated with 32GB of RAM, PAGE files purposely page memory to disk for kernel and most DLL files. So regardless of FREE RAM you will ALWAYS have a page file.

If you LIMIT resources inside the pool, then that's what the system support probably told you, which would cause the VM to expand it's own memory, but it's the use of your resource pool that is causing the problem, not inherit use of Resource pools in general.

Using folders probably would accomplish the same thing, but you wouldn't be able to share resources and watch those groups as a whole.