I've set up a VMWare instance to run CastIron Integration Appliance. I allocated 2gb of memory to the instance, assuming it would take this as physical memory (my server has 8gb total).
When I view top however on the server, the vmware-vmx process has about 100m Resident memory and 1900m Virtual.
Running CastIron it reports that the appliance often hits 50% memory usage. Does this mean I'm using 900mb of harddrive space as memory? I wanted VMWare to use 2gb of physical memory, no swap. Can anyone tell me how to achieve this?
Setup
Debian Lenny 5.0.3
VMWare Server 2.0.2
Best Answer
VMware Server has a setting to define if you want all VM memory to fit in physical RAM, or allow some of them to be swapped; it's in the host settings.
If you have more RAM than you're using, you can safely set it to only use RAM; you will then not be able to power on more VMs if there's not enough available physical memory, of course.