Changing Service Console Memory
January 6th, 2010
Historically I have used sed statements to alter esx.conf and grub.conf to change the amount of allocated service console memory. So this means that we are doing a search and replace assuming a default memory amount (string). ESX 4 and now ESX 3.5U5 have default values other than 272MB.
Instead of the ghetto sed statements, we can use vmware-vim-cmd (vimsh in older ESX3 versions).
vmware-vim-cmd /hostsvc/memoryinfo 838860800
When doing a kickstart install, it needs to be run after first boot instead of the post environment. Something like this (Tested on ESX4.0U1 && ESX3.5U4):
LOGFILE=/root/build.log chvt 3 ### ### Run once script ### cat >> /etc/rc3.d/S99run-once<<EOF1 #!/bin/sh ### ### Sleep while we wait for hostd to start completely ### ### The sleep value will vary based on how fast your system is. ### As a VM on my overloaded laptop, I use 600s. ### sleep 600 ### ### Alter service console memory allocation ### echo "Changing service console memory to 800MB" >> $LOGFILE /usr/bin/vmware-vim-cmd /hostsvc/memoryinfo 838860800 >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 echo "Done changing service console memory" >> $LOGFILE echo >> $LOGFILE rm /etc/rc3.d/S99run-once reboot EOF1 chmod +x /etc/rc3.d/S99run-once