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Adding Memory and CPU to Windows 7 VM

Adding Memory and CPU to Windows 7 VM

I have windows 7 VMs 8GB RAM, 18GHZ, that run Excel Spreadsheets. They consume a lot of resources. I am trying to add more RAM to them through Vsphere Client, but when I select Memory in Edit Settings of the VM, I cannot add memory ,it is grayed out.
Does that mean I have to shutdown the VM in order to add memory?

Thanks
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I thought Hot Add and hot plug is supported in vsphere 5.1
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it may be  supported, but is it licensed ?  is this free vsphere ?
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I shut it down and gave it:
16GB(16565MB) RAM and 10vCPU (26590MHZ)

I am afraid I gave it too much
You may find your version of Windows 7 does not support more than 1 or 2 CPUs. So you have oversubsribed your VM, which can cause performance issues to the VM and Host.

@jskfan you may want to read the following:-

vSMP (virtual SMP) can affect virtual machine performance, when adding too many vCPUs to virtual machines that cannot use the vCPUs effectly, e.g. Servers than can use vSMP correctly :- SQL Server, Exchange Server.

This is true, many VMware Administrators, think adding lots of processors, will increase performance - wrong! (and because they can, they just go silly!). Sometimes there is confusion between cores and processors. But what we are adding is additional processors in the virtual machine.

So 4 vCPU, to the VM is a 4 Way SMP (Quad Processor Server), if you have Enterprise Plus license you can add 8, (and only if you have the correct OS License will the OS recognise them all).

If applications, can take advantage e.g. Exchange, SQL, adding additional processors, can/may increase performance.

So usual rule of thumb is try 1 vCPU, then try 2 vCPU, knock back to 1 vCPU if performance is affected. and only use vSMP if the VM can take advantage.

Example, VM with 4 vCPUs allocated!

My simple laymans explaination of the "scheduler!"

As you have assigned 4 vCPUs, to this VM, the VMware scheulder, has to wait until 4 cores are free and available, to do this, it has to pause the first cores, until the 4th is available, during this timeframe, the paused cores are not available for processes, this is my simplistic view, but bottom line is adding more vCPUs to a VM, may not give you the performance benefits you think, unless the VM, it's applications are optimised for additional vCPUs.

See here
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10131

see here
http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/how-too-many-vcpus-can-negatively-affect-your-performance/

http://www.zdnet.com/virtual-cpus-the-overprovisioning-penalty-of-vcpu-to-pcpu-ratios-4010025185/

also there is a document here about the CPU scheduler

www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf-vsphere-cpu_scheduler.pdf
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I will see if performance is still an issue , i will decrease CPU. what about RAM I gave it 16GB
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I guess low performance is caused by disk I/O
at least by looking at the charts (Disk/RAM/CPU)
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The only VM which slow in the Resource pool.
it runs Excel, huge data.
AV is on all VMs

I wonder if Excel is recommended to be installed on physical machine instead of VM.
I have heard before that Databases Application as well as Excel,MSAccess have High disk I/O, and they need to be installed on physical box…
However we have Exchange 2010 infrastructure and it is installed on VMware, and it runs smooth. Exchange also uses Databases as far as I am concern…but works fine..

The next thing that I might think about is increasing Virtual Memory…?
Workstations can use more resources!

It's pagefile (virtual memory should be set to automatic).

Try 2vCPU and 8GB RAM.

Is it just Excel is slow, and what do you mean by slow?
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Thank you