Could not create anonymous paging file for 2048 MB: Insufficient system resources

[Bazkar]

L.S.

We have a server running VMWare Workstation 7.1 and VMWare Player 3.1.4 build 385536 on Windows 2003 Server R2 SP2 Enterprise edition and very often run into the error above when trying to boot several VMWare machines. (a VMWare.log has been included where the full error is visible.). Some VM's seem to boot normally, where others have this issue.

The VMs are located on drive E of the physical machine. They are configured with 2 GB RAM and a 15GB pre-allocated harddrive. Drive E of the physical machine has over 300GB of free space.

The physical machine has 32GB RAM on board and at the time of the error over 30GB RAM was free.

The physical machine has a 40GB page file configured on drive C, over 20GB of free space still exists on that drive

The VMWare workstation config.ini has also been included as an attachment.

It has a few non-standard settings that were made to dramatically improve disk performance on the VM's

I've read in previous topics that a disk defrag might help, but this does not seem to solve the problem.

[continuum]

How many VMs do you run at the time when you tried to start this one ?

what is the value for RAM under menu > edit > preferences > memory > reserved memory

[Bazkar]

Only 1 other VM was running at the time, but I've also seen the problem happening when no other VM's were running.

The amoung of Reserved memory for VM's is 29491 MB and the machine is set up to fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM.

We do not plan to run over 10 VM's on this host, so all 20GB of memory should easily fit into the physical RAM.

[continuum]

sounds like a problem with 3rd party software to me
can you create a list of all other running processes and post it ?

does it work when you remove
mainmem.useNamedFile = "false"
from the config.ini ?

[Bazkar]

This indeed 'solves' the problem, thank you for the suggestion.

As far as my VMWare knowledge goes, this setting makes sure that the file that is used for storing the memory of the VM is put in the Windows swap file of the physical machine rather than in the directory of the VM itself.

Since the swap file is on a different set of disks than the VM itself, this increased the VM's performance quite dramatically.

Since the swap file on the physical machine is 40GB, it should be able to hold the vmem files for all the virtual machines if I'm not mistaken.

Or should the swap file be at least as big as the memory on the physical machine + all of the vmem files? that is: at least 32GB (physical memory) + 20 GB (virtual memory of all 10 VM's that we plan to run concurrently) ?

At the moment, the problem seems to be that the swapfile on the physical machine is fully 'used' and the VM can't allocate 2GB inside the swapfile of the physical machine, is that correct?

[continuum]

At the moment, the problem seems to be that the swapfile on the physical machine is fully 'used' and the VM can't allocate 2GB inside the swapfile of the physical machine, is that correct?

Nope
at the moment some is going on - it should work with your original settings.
Please create the list of open processes I already asked for

[Bazkar]

The machine is a terminal server and at the moment, some other users are logged on to it. I will post the list of running processes when they are logged off to avoid any unnecessary clutter.

Edit:

I've added 2 screenshots of the taskmanager window with my account name blurred.

Most important other software that is running on this machine is

• Trend Micro AV
• DFS process that synchronises certain folders with another server (that other server is basically it's twin, same hardware, same configurations but that twin doens't have the issue for some odd reason).

[continuum]

did you tell TrendMicro to ignore vmdk and vmem files ?
can you create exceptions for vmware-vmx.exe ?

[Bazkar]

Sorry for taking this long to reply.

After I changed the VMWare setting, the machine went extremely slow and the disk queue length spiked to over 250.

Excluding the vmem and vmdk extensions and the vmware-vmx.exe process from the virusscanner solved this issue. (Since the windows page file was excluded already in the virusscanner, this might explain why the performance was much better when the mainmem.useNamedFile setting was set to false).

Still wondering why the original error was coming up though.

[javely]

I met the same problem after i change my processor from A setting to B setting

A setting:
Number of processor: 1
number of cores per processor: 4

Total processors :4

B setting:
Number of processor: 2
number of cores per processor: 2

Total processors :4

Thus i revert my setting back to A.