virtualbox.org

Hello,
I really need help with this problem because i have to test some applications and for this i need 4 virtual machines opened at the same time:
1. Windows server 2008 SP2 - Domain Controller (1 GB Ram)
2. Windows server 2003 R2 - Routing and Remote Server to give Internet to my domain (512 MB Ram)
3. Windows server 2008 SP2 - SCCM 2007 R3 (1,5 GB Ram)
4. Windows 7 Professional x86 - 1 client (512 MB Ram)

Most of the day i work on the first 3 machines but for the last couple of days... whenever i tried to open the W7 machine...my whole laptop freezed and i had to do a forced shutdown. My first guess was that there was something wrong with the W7 machine but today i opened 1, 3 and 4 and when i tried to opened the W2003 Server machine it freezed again.

I have a Corei3 processor ... western digital caviar black 750 GB HDD and 8 GB of Ram so it shouldnt be an issue.

I really dont know what to do. Please help.

First step would be to have a look at
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=48476
as your post doesn't contain enough information for us to be able to help you.

The host computers has Windows 7 Enterprise x64 bit, corei3 processor and a total of 8Gb Ddr3 installed.
I updated my VirtualBox to the last edition 4.18 and also every virtual machine has Guest Additions Installed, also 4.18 edition.
As i said in my previous post i have 4 virtual machine which i would like to run at the same time...but from an unknown reason i can not.
1. Windows Server 2008 SP2 x86 edition with 1GB ram allocated
2. Windows Server 2003 R2 x86 edition with 512 Mb Ram allocated
3. Windows Server 2008 SP2 x86 edition with 1,5GB ram allocated
4. Windows 7 Professional x86 edition with 512 Mb Ram allocated.

I trully can not understand why i can not run them at the same time. If i add the allocated memory i have 3,5 GB ram out of 8 so this shouldnt be the problem. And my laptop just freezes...not the VirtualBox application...but the whole laptop. It doesnt respond to anything and my only solution is to keep the power button pressed untill it shuts down and than start the laptop again.

As you say this should not be an issue but it is. VirtualBox has been ruled out of the equation as the guests run as stand alone and in some combinations.
You need to look closely at the hosts resources to see what is really going on.

I watched my system's resources while i was working on 3 of the virtual machines. Max 5 out of 8 gigs of ram were occupied and the processor max 35% utilized...and as soon as i start the 4th machine (it doesnt even reach the start of windows) my laptop freezes so i can not really find out what the hell is going on.
Thx anyway. I will try and work as it is now. I did too many things and installations to start working on another VM application like VMWare so i will probably have to switch between the RAR server and the W7 client machine.

I had this problem when I had assigned more video memory to my guests than my system had to offer. Lowering the video memory on each machine so that the total was less than my system's 64 MB resolved the problem. I did get a warning in the settings of each guest that the video memory was not sufficient for full screen mode but as I don't use full screen mode it wasn't a problem.

The video RAM is actually taken from the system memory not the GPU in a virtual guest.

Hi Perryg. Thanks for the reply. You're right, this is still happening after the change I made to the video ram settings.

I have seen some other posts suggesting disabling VT-x acceleration but as all 4 guests are x64 this is not an option.

Any other ideas?

tobewah wrote:Hi Perryg. Thanks for the reply. You're right, this is still happening after the change I made to the video ram settings.

I have seen some other posts suggesting disabling VT-x acceleration but as all 4 guests are x64 this is not an option.

Any other ideas?

Not without seeing the guests log file (as an attachment) when it hangs, freezes, Etc..

The log seems to stop abruptly at the line "00:00:01.881 Audio: Trying driver 'dsound'." so I'm trying alternative audio configurations. Currently the 3 Windows guests are configured with Windows DirectSound / Intel HD Audio and the Linux guest is configured with Windows DirectSound / ICH AC97.

tobewah wrote:The log seems to stop abruptly at the line "00:00:01.881 Audio: Trying driver 'dsound'." so I'm trying alternative audio configurations. Currently the 3 Windows guests are configured with Windows DirectSound / Intel HD Audio and the Linux guest is configured with Windows DirectSound / ICH AC97.

00:00:01.343 Host RAM: 7989MB RAM, available: 1987MB
00:00:01.524 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000080000000 (2 147 483 648, 2 048 MB)

You are assigning more RAM than is available. The host will not have anything to work with.

Well I feel rather foolish. I assumed that memory would be swapped if oversubscribed. I have dropped the memory usage of each machine a little and sure enough they now all fire up, albeit slowly.

Thanks for you help.

What do you expect?

If you could use swapping, the guests will be slowly.

The host does not know whats running in the guest. So the best is giving full RAM size from guest settings to to the guest.

And remember: The host must have enough RAM for itsself. Every started guest is for the host a program like any other.

So virtualization is only usable, if you have at a minimum 1, better 2 GB for the host itsself.

Hello again. I'm not sure this problem does relate to memory allocation. I've just had the problem again and the attached log shows enough available memory for the machine to start:

00:00:02.879 Host RAM: 7989MB RAM, available: 1619MB
00:00:03.275 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000020000000 (536 870 912, 512 MB)

Again the crash happened after the audio section of the log.

The new log isn't very useful I'm afraid, being incomplete. I appreciate there isn't much you can do about that, but facts are facts. If you suspect that audio is at the core of the problem then you could prove that by disabling audio in the VM settings. You might also consider looking for updated audio drivers for your host.