This afternoon @Stevie_chambers published something on twitter on memory limits of vSphere VMs. This was a recap of a question asked on a VMware internal mailinglist, here’s what Steve posted:
Why has a vSphere VM max mem 255GB? VMFS block size of 1MB = 256GB max – 0.4MB VM state = 255.6MB rounded down to 255GB – from Ole@VMware
In other words, the maximum memory size for a vSphere VM is 255 GB. This is the maximum memory size because a swap file needs to be created as well. This swap file cannot exceed the maximum file size of a 1MB blocksized VMFS volume. Max file size = 256GB – VM state(roughly 400MB)=255.6GB. For safety this has been rounded down to 255GB. Which at first sounds like a weird amount but actually makes sense when you read the explanation.
By the way, Steve has recently started a blog: View Yonder. Welcome to the blogosphere!
After I wrote the licensing server post a couple of days back one of my colleagues(Thanks Horst!) was so kind to email me the following script. What it basically does is check every server for the availability of the license source. Of course it can be improved by adding for instance a check to see if the license service is running on the license server and for instance email the results if there’s an error… (more…)
I like trying out new stuff. That’s one of the reasons I upgraded my testing machine to Windows 7. Unfortunately the driver that is included with Windows 7 for the Intel 965 Mobile is far from perfect. Nasty side effects are: flickering taskbar, black boxes on random places of the screen, minimize / maximize / close buttons hidden, taskbar disappearing… as you can see there are more than enough issues to look for a workaround. I tried updating to the latest and greatest version but this did not solve the issues I was facing. But the following did:
- Download the Vista 64 Bit driver for the Intel 965 (in my case Lenovo laptop)
- Unzip the software
- Right click properties on the “setup.exe”
- Click on the Compatibility tab and select mode to “Windows Vista Service Pack 2″ and select “run this program as an administrator” at “privilege level”
- Click “Ok”
- Run the setup and reboot
So far I haven’t experienced the issues anymore…
As regular readers know I am a hardcore-punk fan, now on reading these posts(1, 2) by Microsoft a famous line from a legendary Dutch Hardcore band came to mind; “Will you fight or will you run?”
I think Microsoft just expects their competitors to run or just join the “dark side”. Well it appears that this is not the route VMware has chosen. Instead of not responding to outrageous claims by Microsoft, VMware have chosen to respond and further to responding, striking back as well. Now in this post MS writes as if VMware started the FUD War: Hyper-V Winning Daily/VMware FUD Reaching New Heights.
Now personally I am not a competitive guy… I am not even a marketing guy… I do not normally post competitive stuff, but after all the claims from MS(Anybody remember their little VMworld, Las Vegas stunt? Or there TCO/ROI posts, Please! There is more to TCO than Licensing). I thought it would be nice to help a bit by spreading the word. I guess my post actually worked after judging by the comments and replies in the blogosphere.
Unfortunately for VMware, Microsoft’s Jeff Woolsey, the Sherlock Holmes he is, has discovered that it was Scott Drummond that published the post offending Hyper-V BSOD post. Now I wonder what actually revealed that it was masterpiece of journalistic investigation, could it be the YouTube nickname “drummonds1974″ or maybe the blog article that Scott posted on the 6th of May. (No Jeff, I don’t think it’s a response to your article, check the dates of both Scott’s and your article and do the math! (Saying that please do not use your TCO/ROI calculator to do the math cause it seems to be a bit off 
)
As a side note, some people claim I am not “objective”, hell of course I am not. I am a VMware employee. I earn my money by delivering VMware projects, of course I am not objective. That said Do you think I care? That is not what Yellow-Bricks.com is about. I am not a so called “objective” and/or “journalistic” e-magazine some other blogs and or e-magazines claim to be. (Note I used the word “claim” because I personally do not believe any magazine that is heavily sponsored can be or will be “objective”.) Yellow-bricks is a blog… My personal blog, nothing more and nothing less, and in general it deals about VMware technical issues / tips / tricks.
Now I would like to ask Microsoft, or should I say Jeff Woolsey, to actually watch these videos (and read both responses or any of the comments on these videos) and before talking about credibility, just ask yourself if you should be the one judging other people on credibility:
Or what about these:
Further, while we are on the topic of credibility, moderating blog comments that don’t meet your “requirements” or offer criticsm for your position is not going to increase your credibility in any way. I will not and do not moderate comments, excepting for spam of course, so if you would like to discuss anything related to this topic go ahead… even Microsoft guys are welcome to join in on the fun.
On twitter John Troyer retweeted a question a couple of days ago which basically came down to the following: When your VM which contains the license server goes down and has been down for longer then 14 days you will not be able to actually boot it up. This is because the grace period has expired.
As a VMware PSO Consultant my recommendation is to make sure you always have a “host based” license file laying around. In a normal situation you don’t need to use it. But in a situation like this it will be very useful because you can just change the license to a host based license instead of a “license server”. This would enable you to actually boot up the License VM. When booted up you could easily revert the changes again and point to your license server again.
As some of you noticed, when you install vSphere(ESX) within a VM you will need at least 2GB to get the installer started. Even when it has finished installing you can’t reduce the memory because the following error will occur:
I couldn’t find a way of pre-adjusting the memory requirements but there’s a way to change this behavior and to downsize the memory when the installation has finished. Keep in mind this is, as far as I know, not supported… it’s only to be used to run ESX within VMware Workstation for your demo / test environment. I personally use it for running 2 ESX servers and vCenter within VMware Workstation on my 4GB laptop. (That’s what I actually use to create screenshots and prepare blog articles.)
ESX:
- Install vSphere(ESX) with at least 2 GB memory
- Login to the Service Console and type the following:
vi /etc/vmware/init/init.d/00.vmnix
- Change the following line to the desired value:
RequiredMemory=2064384
- Shutdown the virtual machine and change the VMs memory and boot it up!
Thanks Mark for the comment on ESXi:
- Install vSphere(ESXi) with at least 2 GB memory
- Login to the console via the “unsupported” method.
- Edit the file /etc/vmware/esx.conf and add the following line:
/vmkernel/minMemoryCheck = “false”
- Save the file and shutdown ESXi, change the memory and boot it up!
Don’t use any other editor than “vi”, there are multiple reports of nano wrecking the layout of the file which leads to an unrecoverable error during booting.
It’s almost 01:00 so I’m keeping it short. The news was already published on twitter by my friend @stevie_chambers anyway so half of you already know… During the VMware vSummit award dinner I was awarded the VCDX certification. I’m officially a VCDX and I’m number 007!
I will probably have a picture up here tomorrow…. I’m really excited about this as you can imagine!
