Free ESXi 5.0 8 GB vRAM Limit

Not sure 'which guy' you are talking to, netjunkie. If me, I don't know of any "simple NAS" that will give me 1/10th of the performance and features I got for the price I paid...
 
My point is, for my lab I have no interest in these virtualized NAS boxes. The idea of my lab is to simulate, as close as I can, other production environments. I screw up my lab ALL THE TIME. I have no interest in storage being any part of that and having to deal with that circular relationship. Even if I was going to build a NAS I wouldn't virtualize it. I'd just do it on hardware and be done with it. And yes, I did look at building my own and can't say I regret having two Synology boxes sitting right here one bit.
 
For any other purpose than a home lab, a NAS in a box is a questionable config. It makes no sense to me either. Using ESXi free on unsupported hardware for a business is not something I would personally ever do (free version or not), but I think its even worse to use the software features like vt-d to pass through storage when that isn't supported in ANY situation even if you bought server hardware on the HCL. For a home lab/tinkering... OK, but for a business (or even home use/personal data) I think you're playing with fire if the data matters AT ALL. You've got a VCDX telling you its a bad idea, AND a VMware developer as well.

You guys can do what you want, but expecting experts to condone it won't happen. Otherwise it encourages newer people who read this that are learning to think it isn't a bad idea. It is a bad idea, sorry :\. I realize it works sometimes or even a lot of the time, and so does the stuff in the ghetto mods thread over on the case modding forum, but there IS a difference in the way you approach things.
 
Don't think this a big deal. For lab purposes 8th VRAM to a single guest is nothing to worry about. Honestly If you need more ram for a vm then you should purchase the essentials package. I have a lab with 12 vas most of these don't use more then four even at peak hardly any of those break 2 except for exchange vms. The reason why they did is because vmhost providers were providing guest memory that didn't actually exist in their machines then charging customers as if the ram was actually there. I have had couple customers that I requested for more memory for vms boxes and It turned out they were selling me/us non existent ram which caused sever memory contention issues. This is more aimed at enterprise market which force system admins to actually plan their vms out rather then winging shit that most likely cause support nightmares for vmware.
 
Wrench, when we say it's limited to 8GB that is 8GB total for all VMs on the host. Not 8GB on a single VM.
 
NetJunkie said:
Wrench, when we say it's limited to 8GB that is 8GB total for all VMs on the host. Not 8GB on a single VM.
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Yes the total provisioned vRAM has a maximum of 8GB per socket. You can have a server with 16GB of RAM, but can only use 8GB per socket.
 
defuseme2k said:
For any other purpose than a home lab, a NAS in a box is a questionable config. It makes no sense to me either. Using ESXi free on unsupported hardware for a business is not something I would personally ever do (free version or not), but I think its even worse to use the software features like vt-d to pass through storage when that isn't supported in ANY situation even if you bought server hardware on the HCL. For a home lab/tinkering... OK, but for a business (or even home use/personal data) I think you're playing with fire if the data matters AT ALL. You've got a VCDX telling you its a bad idea, AND a VMware developer as well.

You guys can do what you want, but expecting experts to condone it won't happen. Otherwise it encourages newer people who read this that are learning to think it isn't a bad idea. It is a bad idea, sorry :\. I realize it works sometimes or even a lot of the time, and so does the stuff in the ghetto mods thread over on the case modding forum, but there IS a difference in the way you approach things.
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This has kind of veered off course. I wasn't asking anyone to condone anything - the original thread was about 8GB being a reasonable limit or not. No offense to anyone here, but the only person qualified to issue warnings is lopoetve, since he works there - unless other folks have access to privileged internal info from vmware... If I could get non-crappy performance any other way, I would. Any data I care about is backed up two different ways. That said, I understand the concern about giving people the impression pass thru is a recommended way to do things - various posts should probably issue a strong disclaimer to that effect.
 
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NetJunkie, a few days ago you said they told you on Twitter not to worry about the 8GB limit. Do you have any news on that?
 
I am building a second ESXi host and not sure what to do about RAM. Should I just split the current 16GB I have now?
 
AMD_Gamer said:
I am building a second ESXi host and not sure what to do about RAM. Should I just split the current 16GB I have now?
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Well what will you be doing with your second box?

If you want a second so you can do vMotion, you need an essentials license on both boxes anyway and the 8GB cap doesn't affect you anyway.

If you are looking for a way to allow for all your VMs to run and get around the 8GB limit you are better off just keeping a single box and buying an essentials license as unless your second box is going to be less then $500 an Essentials license will be cheaper.
 
C7J0yc3 said:
Well what will you be doing with your second box?

If you want a second so you can do vMotion, you need an essentials license on both boxes anyway and the 8GB cap doesn't affect you anyway.

If you are looking for a way to allow for all your VMs to run and get around the 8GB limit you are better off just keeping a single box and buying an essentials license as unless your second box is going to be less then $500 an Essentials license will be cheaper.
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This is my learning lab, I plan to do vMotion, HA, FT and all the good stuff. I don't plan to get a license just keep using the evaluation mode. How else do people use all the features in home labs?

I will also upgrade to vSphere 5 when it comes out to learn that.
 
AMD_Gamer said:
This is my learning lab, I plan to do vMotion, HA, FT and all the good stuff. I don't plan to get a license just keep using the evaluation mode. How else do people use all the features in home labs?

I will also upgrade to vSphere 5 when it comes out to learn that.
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Just keep using the eval then. The 8GB vRam limit doesn't affect you then. The eval version of vSphere 5 will continue to give you all the features(and limits) of Enterprise Plus. In other words, 48GB vRam per socket.
 
You know what I see people doing in the end, using their corp/prod/office/whatever licenses in their home labs and calling it a day.

This change only really hurts those small businesses that don't have any kind of licensing.
 
I'm in the middle of moving, but I'm re-doing my home setup to rely on hyper-v for the majority of my testing, and using vmware workstation for OS's that don't work under hyper-v (at least until they cripple workstation too)
 
Has Vmware lost it's focus? I'm responsible for quite a few ESX designs and some ESXi. It's gonna cost us a fortune to do what we do now under esx 5. We have about 1.2Tbyte of ram across the servers. With the ESX 5 Lic we would only be able to use 864!. Then with our ESXi test machines eg one specific box, single cpu,6 core 48G ram, (used on sccm 2012 it has 8G just to itself).
Seems Vmware wants us to go back a step in hardware rationalisation goals and use MORE servers, not less.
So no at present we will not entertain ESX 5, actively looking alternatives and I hate to say it, even hyper -v . Vmware when we asked them to explain said they will look on a "case by case basis on upgrades".
 
You have 1.2TB in RAM...that's physical, right? What's your vRAM amount? Assuming with that many servers you're using a lot of the enterprise feature set that others can't do yet...that's what they are counting on.
 
After thinking about it and doing the sums the vram entitlement is not that far short, however as vram pools seem to be per version we have mostly "Enterprise" not plus , so thats 32 x 28 cpu and then 24x 12 giving pools of 896G and 288G. So if we upgrade all to enterprise plus or buy new cpu licenses to not use thats about £24k for us, plus maint. The issue for me is that limits us to where we are now and no room for more VM's with out spending even more money. Of course weigh this against costs of retraing, changing backup it seems we are "over a barrell" here. Thats not counting out Dev and test machines.
 
Rumor has it VMware is holding a conf call Wednesday (August 3rd) to backpedal on some vRAM issues. We'll see what happens.
 
Looking forward to that bit of information. I've been playing with xen for the past few days just in case its not appealing.
 
enuro12 said:
Looking forward to that bit of information. I've been playing with xen for the past few days just in case its not appealing.
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Me too, really getting frustrated with the memory management in the free version.
 
unreal, i just ordered another 12G for what was to be our first real ESXi box (24G total) and was going to get another Quad Xeon for it to give me 16 threads.. i guess 4.1 stays for me or Xen server.
 
Vmware update - You may have seen it on Vmwares forum but it looks like there will be an announcment tommorrow Thursday by VM which may double the Vram entitlement. We have our Vmware account manager meeting us in the morning. I'll be interseted to see if this applies to Essentials and ESXi versions as well. If permitted, and of any value I'll post their statement, heres hoping!
 
Not sure when VMware's official announcement will be...I know they are planning a blog post with the changes for 5pm Eastern...I can't release my post until theirs goes up.
 
Mmm, the internet. The 24/7 place to get all your news and tech updates. At 5PM. On a Wednesday. Or maybe Thursday.
 
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