Need more RAM for Solaris guest

[rasta]

I need at least 2 GB ram for an app to run well within a Solaris guest on a 32-bit WinXP host with VT-x and 4 GB RAM. 1500 MB ram appears to be the max one can assign a guest. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Is 1500 MB ram also the max for a guest if the host is 64-bit?

Thank you...

[sandervl]

You can use VBoxManage to increase the ram value, but that will lead to failures during execution. It depends on the amount of virtual address space available to an application The default is 2 GB in 32 bits Windows, but you can increase it to 3 GB with a boot.ini option. If you increase it to 3 GB, then you should be able to safely go to at least 2 GB in Windows too.

There is no such limitation with 64 bits hosts.

[rasta]

Thank you very much for the info. Are you saying that if I use the boot.ini option to increase the VAS to 3 GB, then I could use VBoxManage to increase the max ram available to a guest? If I did that, I assume that guest ram could then be set higher than the current max of 1500 MB using the VM settings in the vbox GUI?

Also, are you saying that if the host is Win x64, I wouldn't have to mess with boot.ini or VBoxManage to be able to give my guest 2GB ram in the VM settings?

[sandervl]

The GUI will not allow anything higher than 1.5 GB for 32 bits Windows hosts. I haven't tried the 3 GB option myself, but in theory it should work with > 1.5 GB guest ram sizes.

A 64 bits host does not require any tricks and has a limit of 16 GB if you host has sufficient ram.

[SSCBrian]

Best option is, as mentioned above, go to a 64-bit host where you can assign more RAM. I'm currently running Solaris 10U7 with 2GB assigned under Windows Vista x64 (6GB total) and it works very well.

[rasta]

Thank you both very much for the info.

[rasta]

I added "/3GB" to boot.ini, and increased VM RAM to 2048 MB using VBoxManage. My Solaris 10 64-bit guest booted, but with massive errors, and I could not log in to JDS (the guest hung). So, it doesn't look like increasing guest ram above 1500MB is possible on 32-bit hosts.