I updated my MBA with 4 GB of RAM to Mavericks today.
I have a Windows 7 VM configured for 1200 MB of RAM, which is suspended. Trying to resume it results in a “not enough physical memory” message. The logs show, in part, the following.
2013-10-23T17:18:17.312-06:00| vmx| I120: OvhdMem_PowerOn: lib/overheadmem: paged 626512 nonpaged 37106 anonymous 18340
2013-10-23T17:18:17.312-06:00| vmx| I120: OvhdMem_PowerOn: initial admission: paged 590517 nonpaged 36271 anonymous 5715
2013-10-23T17:18:17.312-06:00| vmx| I120: VMMEM: Initial Reservation: 1270MB (MainMem=1200MB)
2013-10-23T17:18:17.312-06:00| vmx| I120: MemSched_PowerOn: balloon minGuestSize 104857 (80% of min required size 131072)
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: MemSched: reserved mem (in MB) min 128 max 2456 recommended 2456
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: PShare: enabled 1 adaptive 1 scanRate [16, 400]
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: MemSched: pg 590517 np 36271 anon 5715 mem 307200
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: MemSched: numvm 1 locked pages: num 0 max 180092
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: MemSched: locked Page Limit: host 188284 config 628736 dynam -1
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: MemSched: minmempct 50 minalloc 0 admitted 0
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: Msg_Post: Error
2013-10-23T17:18:17.313-06:00| vmx| I120: [msg.memsched.preNotEnoughMem] Not enough physical memory is available to power on this virtual machine with its configured settings.
Activity Monitor reports no swap used (unsurprisingly—Mavericks memory compression is working well), 5.26 GB of virtual memory, 1.08 GB wired memory. vm_stat shows that some active memory would have to be reduced (or compressed pages swapped out) for 1.2 GB, or 307200 pages, to be wired down:
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 89289.
Pages active: 285658.
Pages inactive: 183772.
Pages speculative: 20062.
...
Pages stored in compressor: 328288.
Pages occupied by compressor: 180158.
How large of a VM should I expect to be able to run on this system with Mavericks? I've successfully run up to 2 GB under Mountain Lion, though that's probably pushing things a bit far. I haven't tried rebooting yet as I'm still downloading some software updates.
....
Well, I let the machine sit for a few minutes, and apparently something cleared up — I was able to resume the VM just now. This does feel like a bug, though, in either Mavericks new VM subsystem or in how VMware is interacting with it. My question still stands; any ideas on what a reasonable VM size is that I can reliably use here?
Message was edited by: Anton Rang (added “it works now” paragraph)