Netware RAM amount in ESX3

[mike-p]

For hardware installation minimum of ram is 512 MB for netware 6.5 OS.

NetWare 's efficiency is based on the memory management. Are there any advices about changes of the RAM amount in a NetWare-VM compared to a physical machine ? Recommendations abot the RAM calculation on systems running GroupWise and/or ZENWorks would be interesting too

[esiebert7625]

This is really a Netware question rather then a VMware question. RAM is RAM regardless of it being a physical or virtual server. VMware gives you more flexibility because you can easily adjust the amount of RAM on the VM as needed.

[jonhutchings]

One thing to be aware of - in my experience Netware will allocate and make use of what ever RAM you give it, typically for various buffers and cache. This is different to all other OS's.

ESX will however still make use of its memory management techniques and so you can still over commit RAM if you need to.

I suggest you trawl the novell site for some recommendations for ram sizing for groupwise etc.

Note also that there are issues with smp support for netware on ESX , so avoid making smp netware VMs

[cflath]

I would treat it as you would a physical machine when sizing your VMs. I have 6 NetWare VM's, but I don't admin them so I don't know all that much about them, but I can tell you most are running at 1GB of RAM, one is at 1.5GB, one at 512, and one at 256... but none of them are running GroupWise, which I suspect requires more memory. In general though, no special considerations need to be given for virtual sizing vs physical.

[oreeh]

RAM is RAM regardless of it being a physical or virtual server.

IMHO this isn't the complete story.

Experience shows that virtual system tend to need less memory than the physical equivalents - maybe due to the fact that most physical systems are heavily oversized

[TCronin]

Unlike most VM's, Netware one's do not have as complete a set of VMware tools. In particular there is no memctl driver for balooning.

The best advice I can give when sizing your Netware guests is to give them enough RAM and memory reservations to try and keep them from swapping out to the vm swap file. In some cases we have had to reserve an entire 2GB for them to run at a decent performance level.

[oreeh]

Yes - but the ballooning driver has nothing to do with the memory usage of the VM (and the ballooning shouldn't occur anyway during normal operations).

[TCronin]

I was just making the point that Netware is not as developed for as other OS's as far as virtulization and really do have some diffent quirks.

Overallocation of memory on a host can very negatively affect a Netware guest. In my experience they tend to be the first guests pushed into swapping, which is not a good situation for Netware under ESX.

[oreeh]

I was just making the point that Netware is not as developed for as other OS's as far as virtulization and really do have some diffent quirks.

Agreed!