ESXi V4 & VSPhere Memory Total Capacity Reported Wrong?!

[KristianHeath]

Hi all,

Cringing apolies, I'm a newbie to the community although not to the product range. In fact, I'm sitting a VSphere V4 course at the moment and the instructor mentioned the communities in today's lesson. I've got an (demo licensed) ESXi V4 box sitting on an 'old' Intel Dual Core 2.4Ghz with 2Gb RAM on a desktop class motherboard made by MSI. It is being managed by a (demo licensed) VSPhere server which is actually being run through VMServer 2.0 on another box. Enough scene setting for now though....

I'd noticed some issues getting VMs to power up on the ESXI box. When I switch to the Summary tab for the host it lists "2043.62Mb" under memory capacity. Without any VMs powered on it says the usage is 723Mb. I get and accept that this is the overhead that the hypervisor causes, although it does feel a little high. Howeer, for some reason on the "Resource Allocation" tab it is only reporting 129Mb Total Capacity...Surely this number should be ~1300Mb as the difference between the 2Gb availabe and the ~700Mb being used by the system?!

What am I doing wrong? Am I just misinterpretting the results (although the fact I'm having difficulty powering on VMs surely justifies my doubt!?) or ESXi just not seeing all the memory?

Help!! (Please?)

Cheers,

Kris.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Hello Kris, welcome to the VMware Community forums. You can tweak ESXi to get a bit more memory on the resource tab - http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/memory_allocation.php.

Dave

VMware Communities User Moderator

New book in town - vSphere Quick Start Guide -http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/08/12/new-book-in-town-vsphere-quick-start-guide/.

Do you have a system or PCI card working with VMDirectPath? Submit your specs to the Unofficial VMDirectPath HCL - http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=21.

[KristianHeath]

Dave,

Thanks for the blisteringly fast reply, in a time that Ping requests could be proud of!

I reinstalled ESXi, wondering whether I could have somehow made a detrimental configuration change during my learning stages. I've also made the changes you linked to. Whilst I have noticed a positive effect (some memory being released and made available for me to actually use!) the maths still doesn't quite add up.

Memory usage now reported as : 693Mb

(Resource Allocation) Memory Total Capactity 978Mb

...which still leaves ~400Mb missing. Where is it? Have you got it?

If the answer is simply "The system is using it" then I guess I'll accept that - although it would mean that without any VMs running the system 'costs' ~1200Mb to run. I see that the child objects in the init level of the vmvisor also have memory reservations. Are these all adding up to account for the missing memory, or are their collective memory requirements satisfied by their parent level ("init") or indeed the grandparent level, "vmvisor", that I just changed the setting for?

Thanks again and in advance..

[ealaqqad]

Hi Kristian,

VMware ESXi just like any hypervisor available today, will require an overhead for every virtual machine it run. Therefore, the number mentioned below can be OK as an over head to run your VMs.

A second note, if you are running the initial release of vSphere you might want to consider patching it or updating it as there was a bug that cause a wrong memory usage being reported. You can find more about this bug & the solution at the following post:[ Guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on VMware ESX 4|http://www.virtualizationteam.com/virtualization-vmware/vsphere-virtualization-vmware/guest-operating-systems-memory-usage-might-be-overestimated-on-vmware-esx-4.html]

I hope this help some one, if it does please reward points.

Enjoy,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

System X & Storage Technical Specialist

Founder of http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com