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I have a very tiny testing environment, which I just upgraded to vSphere 4.1. I chose to reinstall the vCenter server on a 64bit Windows 2003 VM with a local SQL express installation, having only 1GB of memory and a single vCPU. I know this is against best practice, but I like to follow the much older best practice to “start out small” like VMware has been (and still is) preaching about. So I started out small. Although 1GB of memory is not even really small for my measures 🙂

I quickly noticed that the VM was running fine at first, but soon started hogging CPU resources, and was hardly responsive. vCenter 4.1 could not have grown to such a resource eater I figured. So I checked to settings of the Windows server, and I changed the swapfile size to a fixed value (the system managed size can have impact when growing).

To have a look at the SQL settings, I decided to download and install the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express tool, which can be obtained here.

Looking into the settings, I noticed that SQL is set to take all memory it can (the max value was set at 2TB I believe). I changed that setting to 768MB, meaning SQL can use 768MB as a maximum, leaving 256MB for “the rest” (read: vCenter and VUM). If needed you might fiddle with this setting.

After changing these values, vCenter began to respond properly. Sometime the VM gets really busy, but quickly returns to “normal” behaviour; no more “stampede”.

Take care: This is in no way meant for a full-blown production environment. Always follow VMware’s best practices… But if you have a test environment which is really REALLY small, consider these changes to extent the life of your single socket, dual core ESX nodes by a year (or possibly two) 🙂

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