Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have a RHEL 3 machine that is part of a VMWare cluster.

In VMware mgr Im told the machine has 24Gb of RAM
As built it had 8 GB of RAM
Looking at /proc/meminfo Im told

  • [root@vmware1 root]# cat /proc/meminfo
    total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
    Mem: 275017728 261877760 13139968 0 37883904 72368128
    Swap: 567500800 284119040 283381760
    MemTotal: 268572 kB
    MemFree: 12832 kB
    MemShared: 0 kB
    Buffers: 36996 kB
    Cached: 55696 kB
    SwapCached: 14976 kB
    Active: 184772 kB
    ActiveAnon: 127352 kB
    ActiveCache: 57420 kB
    Inact_dirty: 35204 kB
    Inact_laundry: 7852 kB
    Inact_clean: 3000 kB
    Inact_target: 46164 kB
    HighTotal: 0 kB
    HighFree: 0 kB
    LowTotal: 268572 kB
    LowFree: 12832 kB
    SwapTotal: 554200 kB
    SwapFree: 276740 kB
    CommitLimit: 688484 kB
    Committed_AS: 1868008 kB
    MachineMem: 25165088 kB

.. Which makes it look like ~268Mb. I don't really want to unrack it and count chips.

Where do I find 'the truth' (as pertains to this..)?

share|improve this question
This is really unclear. VMWare is a company, not a product. What VMWare product are you using? Assuming you're using ESXi: are you running that command on an ESXi console or on the guest? What good would "counting chips" do if it's the guest that you're concerned about? –  MDMarra Jul 26 '12 at 19:45
add comment

1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

MachineMem: 25165088 kB

Looks to me like the amount of memory in your machine is 24 GB.

Essentially, there's a virtual machine for ESX running your service console. That's what the MemTotal value is showing. The ESX Service Console virtual machine has 256 MB of RAM. Machinemem is the total amount of physical RAM in the server, which is 24 GB.

share|improve this answer
So when I ssh to the machine thats a VM (of sorts) too? With 268mb of RAM allocated to it? –  ethrbunny Jul 26 '12 at 21:26
@etherbunny Hard to tell with the limited information you've given, but I'd guess that yes, you're still working within the context of of the ESX VM, so you're still seeing the memory allocated to it under memtotal. –  HopelessN00b Jul 26 '12 at 23:21
add comment

Your Answer


