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MrVimes
Asked: 2013-11-30 08:03:24 +0800 CST

Are there any disadvantages to unusual RAM amounts for virtual machines?

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This is going to seem like a silly question, but many many years ago I somehow got it into my head, perhaps from reading an article or speaking to people 'in the know' that a computer should not be run with 'odd' amounts of ram, such as 3, 5, 7 etc... Is there any truth in this whatsoever?

I have a vmware environment with many servers in it. I want to go through and alter the amounts of ram to reduce the overall ram usage and in many cases I want to give a server 3gb of ram as opposed to 4 or 2.

vmware-esxi

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I've never ever seen any proof that the precise value of RAM matters on a virtual machine. I suppose it's not implausible that some legacy systems may somehow expect an even number, but that would just be incredibly bad engineering.

    Certainly - it's pretty natural for people to allocate in multiples, but this tends to be because they know Server [A] needs 8GB of RAM, rather than 7GB.

    If you want to give you server 3GB, then absolutely go right ahead; I use odd numbers all of the time.

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  2. It's fine. There's no downside. Remember, the granularity is is Megabytes, so if you need 2,560MB instead of 2GB or 3GB, it's fine, fully supported and a non-issue.

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