ESX Server 3i 3.5 seems to be using a lot of RAM

Right, so i've installed ESX to use as a lab environment.

I havn't created any VM's yet and the Summary tab in IC is reporting the current memory usage as 364MB's.

I thought it would be way below that?

I could just install Ubuntu with Virtual Box and it would use less memory...

Any comments?

Cheers.

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ConstantlyLearning

Just had a thought..

Infrastructure Client pulling all that data probably takes up a bit?..

astorrs

That's not exactly a lot of memory for an operating system to be consuming, I'd be very surprised if your install of Ubuntu with VirtualBox consumed less memory (since Ubuntu needs a little more than that to just perform decently).

The benefits will come when you start running multiple copies of the same O/S and Transparent Page Sharing starts sharing memory pages where it can, not to mention you can overcommit the guest memory in ESXi.

To be perfectly honest if 364MB is that crucial to you, you probably need to just go buy some more RAM...

MentholMoose

It could be worse, I have some servers with 64GB RAM running XenServer and they report 3% memory usage when idle!!

JDMurray

astorrs wrote: »

To be perfectly honest if 364MB is that crucial to you, you probably need to just go buy some more RAM...

Yes, exactly. ESX and ESXi are professional server operating systems and assume they will be used in applications that require a lot of VMs, and therefore a lot of RAM will be present on the physical server, so 364MB is just a comparative drop in the bucket. I'm not sure how much RAM VMware Server uses when it's freshly installed with no VMs, but it might be an acceptable alternative if RAM is at a premium for you.

tiersten

ConstantlyLearning wrote: »

I havn't created any VM's yet and the Summary tab in IC is reporting the current memory usage as 364MB's.

I thought it would be way below that?

I could just install Ubuntu with Virtual Box and it would use less memory...

The minimal "service console" in ESXi uses some memory still. Same again with the actual ESX hypervisor.

As others have pointed out, Ubuntu + Virtual Box with no VMs will be using quite a bit of memory still.