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On NUMA Systems With More Than 64GB RAM, ESX Server Host Might Fail to Boot (1000087)

Details

An ESX Server host supports a maximum of 64GB of physical memory. On NUMA systems, memory must be distributed equally among the NUMA nodes. If a NUMA system has more than 64GB of RAM, the ESX Server automatically truncates the RAM to 64GB. As a result of this truncation, some nodes might be left without memory and the later part of VMkernel initialization might fail.

Note: when upgrading to ESX 3.5.x, please review memory specifications. For e.g., the specification for memory for 3.0.x is 64GB. This increases to 256GB with ESX 3.5.x release.

Solution

Remove memory from each node so that the amount of memory left on each node is balanced across NUMA nodes. Ensure the total physical memory present on the server is not greater than 64GB.

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