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VMWare ESXi datastore disabled while the system is up

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http://serverfault.com – Yesterday, I had a ESXi server working. Total memory required by the deployed virtual machines is higher than the physical RAM. The disk also has a few Gigabytes of free capacity. Today my server stopped normal operation! According the to Performance reports, memory usage exceeded the physical memory and the disk has not enough free space to swap it. In 'Configuration > Storage' , the datastore is disabled and is not accessible. SSH connection to ESXi is possible, however, any disk command takes a long time to execute (e.g. df). I tried to halt some VMs to free up some memory. But the 'Power (HowTos)

taskli's picture
Submitted by taskli on 07/14/2012 – Made popular on 07/14/2012

Stories similar to VMWare ESXi datastore disabled while the system is up

We are server with 48 GB RAM.( We have installed ESXi 4.1 )

For each VM we are allocating 4GB of memory. Since the server is having 13 VM, My manager thinks that i am doing wrong thing.

I am going to explain them that it will actually manage by itself.

How much can I overhead the physical memory of my host assigning memory to my guest machine?

Example:

Host physical memory:10 GB

Is it acceptable for example assigning 2GB of virtual memory to 7 machines for a total of 14GB ? How much can I overcommit the memory ensuring balooning and other host memory freeing technique works fine?

When running VMs on an ESXi host, you can overcommit the memory.

Example: host == 20GB physical RAM

The amount of RAM allocated to each VM is

VM1 == 10gb VM2 == 10gb VM3 == 10gb VM4 == 10gb

The result is even though there is only 20GB of ram available, We have actually allocated 40GB of it.

There is no problem with this if each machine uses and average of 5GB of "active" memory (inactive me

Our team is preparing for performance testing. (we are using ESXi 4.1)

They asked me to make a VM with 4 cpu and 12 GB RAM.

I have an issue where when I try to build a really large project, my machine starts swapping (several GB) even though there's plenty of memory (14 GB in fact).

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I am having issues with a server running out of physical memory and I'm having troubles discerning whether it is from my application's Java process or something else on the server.

I'm debating on doing an ESXi 4.1/5.0 installation on a USB stick or a pair of 32GB SATA II SSDs (RAID1 mirror). According to VMWare's documentation, when ESXi is booting it looks for a 4GB space for a scratch partition. Assuming the USB stick I use has adequate storage (say 16GB), is there any advantage to installing ESXi on an SSD or better yet, and SSD RAID1 mirror?

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