Thursday, February 10, 2011

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 SP1 - RTM (how to trick your VM)


SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 is ready to reach every datacenter around the world.

I have been running the SP1 for a while now, and it has been a success.
One of the greatest advantages provided by Dynamic Memory is the capacity planning part.
A server with 48GB RAM using 70-80% of it, was reduced to 30-40%. And for the cluster, I only need to calculate the startup-RAM in case of failover.

And that`s what is all about – to utilize your server hardware.

I`ve tested various server setups with Dynamic Memory enabled, to see how it acts.
One of the first challenges, was to get pass the memory requirements during install,
(If you install SCVMM for example, it requires 2GB RAM).
There is an easy trick to bypass this one. The answer is mspaint.
Launch mspaint, go to file à Settings, and tweak the pixels so that the VM use more memory.
Once it`s passed the requirement, continue with your setup.

1. Before
2. After


(This is an old trick. I knew a fellow that actually complained about his computer RAM-use to his boss, and claimed a new computer. He only ran mspaint and no other applications… he got himself a new computer the week after… )
when the VM was not aware of anything else than the assigned startup RAM.

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