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VMWare - "not enough physical memory"

L

lord_emperor

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
489
Hello there, I hope this is an apropriate place to post this.

I'm running VMWare Workstation 6.5 on my Vista 32-bit Ultimate desktop which has 2GB of RAM. VMWare is set to allow up to 1024MB of memory to all VMs. VMs are allowed to swap some memory. My Vista box is a relatively fresh install, it's been up for ~2 weeks and pretty much just has NOD32 antivirus and some games I can't live without installed.

Ballpark of the memory use of all processes in task manager including the running VMs is 600MB.

I don't have Nero installed.

I have 3 VMs running.
1 Ubuntu desktop configured with 128MB RAM.
2 CentOS servers configured with 64MB of RAM each.

If I try to start a 4th VM, even a Damn Small Linux configured with 4MB of RAM, I get the "Not enough physical memory is available to power on this virtual machine" error.

Rebooting the host does not help.

Any ideas?
 
Did you install Workstation more than once, or reinstalled it for some reason?
Try and change the preference to 0 MB and see whether one of your VMs will start up anyway. If it will, then there's some issue with the value you set not being written to the config file. I suppose you could just look at the config file right away: C:\Users\All Users\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini
It should say: prefvmx.allVMMemoryLimit = "1024"
 
Checked the config, it was 1024. I slid it to 1025 and it updated in the config.

Still couldn't power on a new VM.

Set the total available memory to 16MB (wouldn't allow 0). It let me start a VM with a warning.

Set total available memory to 1100MB and I was able to start another machine.

64+64+128=256 by my count. Why does VMware think 1024MB is insufficient?

In the end this doesn't effect mush since I can put ths slider all the way up and still use only ~60MB on VMware.

It's just confusing.
 
lord_emperor said:
Hello there, I hope this is an apropriate place to post this.

I'm running VMWare Workstation 6.5 on my Vista 32-bit Ultimate desktop which has 2GB of RAM. VMWare is set to allow up to 1024MB of memory to all VMs. VMs are allowed to swap some memory. My Vista box is a relatively fresh install, it's been up for ~2 weeks and pretty much just has NOD32 antivirus and some games I can't live without installed.

Ballpark of the memory use of all processes in task manager including the running VMs is 600MB.

I don't have Nero installed.

I have 3 VMs running.
1 Ubuntu desktop configured with 128MB RAM.
2 CentOS servers configured with 64MB of RAM each.

If I try to start a 4th VM, even a Damn Small Linux configured with 4MB of RAM, I get the "Not enough physical memory is available to power on this virtual machine" error.

Rebooting the host does not help.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Workstation will try to set a memory reservation for some percentage of ram given to the vms by default - you change that with the swap none/some/almost all option. Even if the vms aren't using the ram, it will keep that reservation to guarantee taht if they DO, you won't suddenly have ram contention issues (it plans for worst-case-scenario). Set to swap almost all and just watch the memory yourself :)

edit: I mis-read. sec, let me dig in mroe - leaving the prior above still up as it's valid in case people are curious :)
 
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