On 06/28/2012 12:45 PM, Michael Eager wrote: > Hi -- > > I have a server running CentOS 5.8. It has a 6-core AMD processor, > 16Gb memory, and a RAID 5 file system. It serves as both a file server > and to run several VMware virtual machines. The guest machines run > Windows 7 and various versions of Linux. > > The system is running the latest version of VMware Workstation. > Until recently, I started VMs using the VMware Workstation GUI. > The system has been very stable and seldom crashes. > > Recently, I set up an init script to start several VMs at boot > time using the vmrun command. This appeared to work correctly, > but the system has become unstable, freezing at various times. > When the system freezes, there is no console response and it > does not respond to a ping. There is nothing in syslog to > indicate any error. > > The script started 8 VMs. I've cut back to now running 4 VMs > and the system appears stable. > > Is there some relation between the number of cores and the number > of VMs one can run? > > Is there something else which might cause the system to crash > when running multiple VMs? > > Any suggestions to identify why the system crashed? > Are you staggering the startups of the VMs? The server may be choking trying to boot 8 machines at once. I suggest starting a VM every 30-60 seconds, so that you aren't trying to boot all 8 at once. Don't know if it will help, but it might.