Chris Lloyd
chrislloyd403@gmail.com

Force lower memory limits in XenServer VMs

2011/11/27

XenServer forces you to use a lot of memory when defining VMs. For example, the Windows 7 64-bit VM won’t let you define a VM with less than 2GB of memory. This can be a problem when testing XenServer stuff on small (non-server) machines.

After the VM is created. You can lower the memory limit by accessing the text console of the host and using “xe vm-list” to find the UUID of the VM to modify, then “xe vm-param-set” to drop the minimum memory setting.

[root@virtual0 ~]# xe vm-list
uuid ( RO)           : 194ac4a5-c6ad-6453-6108-8186f2bc6935
     name-label ( RW): xm1.vc.example.com
    power-state ( RO): halted


uuid ( RO)           : 63a19c31-9835-4bb4-97b3-c2230cefd9ed
     name-label ( RW): Control domain on host: localhost.localdomain
    power-state ( RO): running


[root@virtual0 ~]# xe vm-param-set memory-static-min=512MiB uuid=194ac4a5-c6ad-6453-6108-8186f2bc6935

Now XenCenter will allow you to set a lower memory size.

Comments