Tag Archives: Memory

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Important Updates for the Hyper-V Cluster – Part 9

Posted on by
Reply

Since we have installed our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster on the Cisco UCS, Microsoft released some patches for Hyper-V, Windows and Clustering.

There are two really important Updates which I would recommend for Hyper-V Clusters.

  • The first is Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Service Pack 1 brings a lot of Hotfixes for Hyper-V, Failover Cluster Feature and other Microsoft Server features. And it brings also a two new features called Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.
  • The second one is a hotfix for Servers with Intel Westmere or Sandy Bridge and has a large amount of physical memory. Most of the Cisco UCS Blades will meet this configuration. You can get more information on this Hyper-V hotfix here.

This two updates will bring you a much better experience with your Hyper-V Cluster. It will improve performance, stability and it will add new features.

Pagefile size limits on Windows Server 2003

Posted on by
Reply

Some moths ago I posted a Blogpost called “Pagefile size bigger than 4095MB on Windows Server 2003“. In this post I wrote about the pagefile size limit of 4096MB. Today I got a comment on this post which shows another solution for this.

If you use the /PAE (Wikipedia Link: Physical Address Extension) switch, the pagefile is not limited to 4096MB anymore. Using the PAE switch limits the pagefile to 16TB, this should be enough for the most Windows Server 2003 32-bit systems. If you don’t use PAE the limit of the Pagefile remains 4GB.

By the way, Windows Server 2003 x64 can also have pagefiles up to 16TB and Windows Server 2003 for IA64 systems can have pagefiles up to 32TB. And for all versions, Windows Server 2003 supports up to 16 pagefiles.

For more information on memory limits in Windows Server 2003 check out this TechNet Blog post.

Thank goes to Ethan Anderson for giving me this information.

Powershell: Changing registry key value

Posted on by
1

Powershell Header

After posting Pagefile size bigger than 4095MB on Windows Server 2003 I had the Idea to change this registry values with powershell.

  1. First start powershell
  2. You can get all PS Drives with the command 
    Get-PSDrive

    Get-PSDrive

  3. Now you see the drive HKLM which stands for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  4. Open this Registry Key 
    Set-Location 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management'
  5. With this command you get all the key values 
    Get-ItemProperty -path .
  6. With the next command you can set the the key value 
    Set-ItemProperty -path . -name "PagingFiles" -value "D:\pagefile1\pagefile.sys 4096 4096"

And now the simple way with multiple entries:

$values = @"
D:\pagefile1\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
D:\pagefile2\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
"@
$keys = "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management"
$name = "PagingFiles"
Set-ItemProperty -path $keys -name $name -value $values

Pagefile size bigger than 4095MB on Windows Server 2003

Posted on by
5

UPDATE: If you can use PAE on your Windows Server 2003 you should check out this post: Pagefile size limits on Windows Server 2003

The pagefile size on Windows Server 2003 x86 and other Windows x86 platforms is limited to 4095 MB per pagefile. But a lot of Windows Server 2003 systems already have 4GB RAM and are using PAE (Physical Address Extension) to use them. So it would be useful to create more than 4 GB pagefiles.

Microsofts solution for this is to create multiple pagefiles. You can now create multiple pagefiles on different partitions. If you don’t have enough partitions or you just have one, you can create multiple pagefile in different folders by using the Windows Registry.

Pagefiles

  1. Create the folders on the drive where the pagefiles should be located. For example, C:\Pagefile1, C:\Pagefile2, and C:\Pagefile3.
  2. Open regedit.exe
  3. I would recommend to create a backup of the registry
  4. locate this key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemoryManagement
  5. Edit the value “PagingFiles”
  6. Remove the existing values and add the following values:
    C:\Pagefile1\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
    C:\Pagefile2\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
    C:\Pagefile3\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
  7. Save this

Note: It’s still recommended to have the Pagefiles on the same partition as the system

You can get more information in this Microsoft Knowledge Base entry: How to overcome the 4,095 MB paging file size limit in Windows

How to do this with Powershell: Powershell: Changing registry key value