16gb not enough?

I am running a home lab on my main pc in a vmware, when all 5 computers are on load, it hovers at around 15gb (i have 16gb total)

dual core cpu fluctuates, do I need more ram?

I have an exchange box (with all 4 roles), 1 DC (really need another one), 1 edge server, and 2 windows 8 (i should turn these into windows xp to cut back on the load these are just to test the mailboxes...)

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Comments

Essendon

Are you experiencing performance issues? If yes, scale back on the RAM on the Win 8 clients or go with an older client with less RAM. Or just go one client.

gbdavidx

yeah, it seems to take forever to do anything on the win8 server, when my win8 clients are doing something or loading

DigitalZeroOne

Besides RAM, if you have everything on one physical hard drive, all those VMs may really slow things down. I have 32GB of RAM, but I run everything on one drive, at times, my hard drive will stay at 100% and my VMs will really slow down when copying files or just moving around the GUI.

I'm been kind of lazy about adding a secondary drive, but I will do it. You probably still need more RAM, or give less RAM to your VMs.

sratakhin

I only have 8 GB and I was able to run several DCs, 2k8 R2 servers and W7 clients. No performance problems. However, all my VMs were on an SSD drive.

gbdavidx

i have them stored on a seconday hard drive, i will need a bigger ssd

jibbajabba

CPU is rarely the bottleneck, unless you have assigned too many vCPUs and you have scheduling issues. 16GB of RAM is enough for a lab, however, we tend to use it for more than just a lab and you easily run out. Always worth having more cowbell, I mean RAM, if you can afford it. But bottleneck number 1 on nested setups is indeed disk performance. You could try to move non essential VMs off the SSD and use the SSD for swap. Use it for VM swap to start with. Create a vmdk on the SSD which is used purely for VM pagefiles, if vSphere recognises the SSD as such, configure host caching.

ITMonkey

gbdavidx wrote: »

... i will need a bigger ssd

That ... or get into the habit to make differential/linked (hyper-v/VMware terminology, respectively) system volumes. Also be light on the RAM you assign to vm's ... and take care about having too many snapshots.

Also, if your vm's are Windows Server, consider having them all Server Core, and begin using RSAT, Remote Desktop, or one Server 2012 Server Manager to manage/configure them all.

QHalo

If RAM really is a concern, think about slimming some VMs down. In a lab environment you don't need to run things at the MS 'recommended minimums' all the time.

bdub

Didnt see it asked but are you running vmware workstation or ESXi? I havent used ESXi in awhile so I am not sure if all the same memory features are available for ballooning so that the host will take back unused ram but I am pretty sure vmware workstation does not have such features.

For my home lab I use client hyper-v on win8 and can easily run 10 vm's with 16gb of ram with dynamic memory turned on.

Like others have said the slowness is likely due to a disk bottleneck, but if you want to free up some ram sounds to me like whatever hypervisor you are running is not reclaiming unused memory to the host.