After installing Windows 7 SP1, VMware Workstation reports the error: Not enough physical memory is available to power this virtual machine
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After installing Windows 7 SP1, VMware Workstation reports the error: Not enough physical memory is available to power this virtual machine

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Article ID: 306113

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Updated On:

Products

VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

After installing Windows 7 SP1, you experience these issues in VMware Workstation:

  • Your virtual machine fails to power on
  • You cannot start a virtual machine
  • Workstation reports the error:

    Not enough physical memory is available to power this virtual machine with its configured settings

  • In the vmware.log file, you see entries similar to:

    vmx| VerificationOfHostParameters status 2
    vmx| Failed to verify host parameters

cannot-power-on cannot-start-up cannot-start-vm cannot-start-windows error-reported power-on-fails power-on-vm start-operating-system start-operating-system-fails start-up start-vm start-vm-fails unable-to-start-vm vm-power-on-fails

Environment

VMware Workstation 7.x (Windows)

Resolution

After installing Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 2008 R2 SP1 on a 64bit host, you may experience this issue while trying to start a virtual machine. This issue is resolved by Workstation 7.1.4. You can download the latest version of Workstation from our Download Center.
This issue occurs because SP 1 changes the way in which Windows handles memory management. For more information about the changes in SP 1, see Documentation for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (KB976932).
If you cannot install the latest version of Workstation, you have other alternatives:
  1. You can resolve this issue by uninstalling SP1. For more information, see How to uninstall Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) .

    Note: The preceding links were correct as of March 22, 2011. If you find the link is broken, provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.
  2. To workaround this issue, you can add a setting to the config file to restrict Workstation to using a percentage of the host's available RAM:
    1. Shut down all running virtual machines and exit Workstation.
    2. Open the config.ini file located at C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation.
    3. Add this line to the file:

      vmmon.disableHostParameters = TRUE

    4. Save and close the file.
    5. Restart Windows.

This ensures that the virtual machine uses only 75% of the host memory.



Additional Information

Workstation prior to 7.1.4 does not support Windows 7 SP 1 and Windows 2008 R2 SP1 as host operating systems. For a complete list of the supported operating systems, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
If you are encountering this issue and you have not installed SP 1, see Resolving the error: The virtual machine is unable to reserve memory (1014955).
安装 Windows 7 SP1 后，VMware Workstation 报告错误：没有足够的物理内存启动此虚拟机
Windows 7 SP1 のインストール後、VMware Workstation に「Not enough physical memory is available to power this virtual machine」というエラーが表示される

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