Not sure if Software is the best forum for this question but here goes...

I have VMWare Player installed on Ubuntu 8.04. If I look at the system monitor I see that Ubuntu is using perhaps 400 MB of the 3 GB of RAM installed on the PC. If I invoke a VM which I have allocated 1 GB of RAM, the memory usage shown in the host OS shows little change. It I look at the guest OS (the VM) it shows perhaps 200 MB in use.

Apparently the VM is helping itself to RAM, not asking VMWare Player for RAM which the Player in turn would request from the host OS.

So the question is... How do I know how much RAM is in use on the PC and/or how much is available? I tried loading 4 VMs concurrently and the PC fell over and died. CPU utilization was very low, the hard drive was not being accessed but the PC was totally unresponsive. Seems that the RAM had been used up.

Thanks,

Ken

I don't use VMWare, and I don't like the GUI monitor, but here goes. I would be most surprised if the memory isn't being accounted for properly (by the system).
In the (GUI) monitor, it looks like the memory used (under Resources tab) is the total used minus cache and buffers (like free command shows on the second line). For the individual processes, looks like RSS minus shared.
Personally I'd use sysstat, or if you don't want to install that, "top" and "free" to watch things. Stick them in a batch script and loop it every 15 seconds - write the stdout to a file for some decent data.

Surely you can limit memory usage in the configuration file for each image? It has been a while but I seem to remember I could even set up things in such a way that virtual machines had a pool of RAM to share - and the virtual machine could even take back whatever was not required.

Thanks all - I believe it was an issue with the GUI monitor.