A couple of days ago I installed a new virtual machine with Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and SQL Server 2008 Standard, to check for a web application for a customer. Everything went smooth and worked perfectly well. (The host is a Windows 8.1 machine).
After testing the systems, I put the virtual machine to sleep instead of turning it off. But on the third day, when tried to play the VM again, I was presented with the following error:
“Not enough physical memory is available to power on this virtual machine with its configured settings.”
To fix this problem, power off other virtual machines, decrease the memory size of this virtual machine to 768 MB, increase the amount of physical memory for all virtual machines to 2256 MB, or adjust the additional memory settings to allow more virtual machine memory to be swapped.
It is possible that native applications and/or services have locked down memory which could be preventing the virtual machine from launching. Shutting down unnecessary applications or services may free enough memory to launch this virtual machine.
If you were able to power on this virtual machine on this host computer in the past, try rebooting the host computer. Rebooting may allow you to use slightly more host memory to run virtual machines.
The actual number of megabytes that the prompt tells you to configure may change, and sometimes it even changes between reboots of the host machine.
I tried a different VM, I got the same error. I couldn’t make any VM to boot.
The Solution?
Modify the config.ini file (Host Parameters)
1. Open the config.ini file located by default at C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation.
2. Add the following line to the end of the file:
vmmon.disableHostParameters = “TRUE”
3. Save the file. You may need to edit it as an administrator in case you get an error during the save.
4. Reboot your host computer.
5. Run VMware Workstation and boot your VM.
This fixed my problem.