Something I’ve known the benefits of for a while, but didn’t actually make part of my standard ESX build until fairly recently, is increasing the service console memory during install to 800MB. Out of the box, VMware has given (in both ESX 3.X and vSphere) the service console 272MB of memory. This may be fine in most cases but there’s absolutely no harm in making this change during your install. Most systems today have plenty of memory, giving up a couple hundred MB really shouldn’t be an issue.
If you are planning on running any type of management or backup agents in your service console (dell server administrator, etc.) then this is a must. During your inital ESX install/configuration, be sure to set your swap partition at 1600MB. This is double the maximum of 800MB of memory VMware allows you to assign to the service console. This setting can be changed once your host is up and manageable via the VI client, but does require a host reboot.
Several times I have seen cases of hosts disconnecting from VC because the vpxa agent is utilizing all available service console memory. I have also been instructed by a couple of different vendors (for example, for vizioncores vRanger product) that slow snapshot deletion, lots of service console paging, as well as host disconnect from VC while utilizing their product is caused by lack of service console memory.
Long story short, do yoursef a favor during your initial install. Create that 1600MB swap partition, and give your service consoles 800MB of memory. You may save yourself from a complete rebuild in the future.
- Log in to VirtualCenter from the Virtual Infrastructure Client with a user that has administrative rights. If you don’t have Virtual Center, log in directly to the ESX Server host as root .
- From the Inventory select the ESX Server host.
- Click the Configuration tab.
- Click Memory.
- Click Properties.
- On the Memory window and enter 800MB for the service console parameter.
- Click OK.
