Knowledge Base

Change minFreePct to a value less than 6% and no lower than 2%. Any setting lower than 2% is not supported by VMware and is not recommended.

Note: VMware does not recommend changing the minFreePct value for systems with less than 64GB of memory.

To change the minFreePct setting for a running ESXi host:

1. Log into the ESXi host console or use SSH. For more information, see: Using Tech Support Mode in ESXi 4.1 (1017910) and Enabling SSH on an ESXi 4.1.x host when hostd is unavailable (1033013).
   
   
2. Set the value of minFreePct using the vsish command:
   
   vsish -e set /sched/freeMemoryState/minFreePct <Percentage>
   
   For example, to set the value of minFreePct to 2%:
   
   vsish -e set /sched/freeMemoryState/minFreePct 2
   
   The change takes effect immediately.
   
   Note: The change does not persist across reboots. As a workaround, you can add the vsish command to /etc/rc.local. This runs the command on the ESXi host at each startup. For more information on how to edit the file, see Editing configuration files in VMware ESX (1017022).
   

To validate the current minFreePct setting on the ESXi host:

1. Log into the ESXi host console or use SSH. For more information, see: Using Tech Support Mode in ESXi 4.1 (1017910) and Enabling SSH on an ESXi 4.1.x host when hostd is unavailable (1033013).
   
   
2. Get the current value of minFreePct using the vsish command:
   
   vsish -e get /sched/freeMemoryState/minFreePct
   
   Note: You can also see the change in esxtop for the minfree value, which is found in VMKMEM on the Memory screen. For more information on the esxtop command, see Performance Monitoring Utilities: resxtop and esxtop in the vSphere Resource Management Guide.