Could not create anonymous paging file for 8192

[KhurramShahxad]

Hello Experts,

I am using VMWare Workstation Pro below is the screenshot showing the information of my current VMWare Workstation Pro setup.

Please note my host machine only having Windows 11 Pro along with Windows related basic applications / games etc and apart from these application I have VMWare Workstation Pro installed on my host OS. Here is another screenshot of Memory Preferences from VMWare Workstation Pro FYR.

 

The host machine is having (NVME-M2) drive of 2TB with 2 Partitions. C (265 GB) and and D (1.55 TB)

C drive is only for OS installation and VMWare Workstation Pro has been installed on C drive. Currently C drive is having 180 GB free space out of 265 GB.

All my VMs are installed in D drive and currently D drive is having 828 GB free from 1.55 TB.

Since morning I am unable to run multiple VMs, usually I was able to execute 2 VMs at the same time and in some cases I was able to run 3 VMs at the same time, however since morning due to error I am only able to run 1 VM at 1 time. Whenever I try to run the 2nd VM I receive this below error.

 

Really no idea what to configure and where. 

Appreciate your support in resolving the issue.

------------------------------------

Update

Current virtual memory settings are shown below

 

After posting the original message whole day my host machine was like dying. Memory was going to 99%. Now suddenly I received this error and the machine got hanged. I tried my best however ended restarting (switched off and on again)

I have also added support data.

 

Please VMWare support team kindly help to resolve this issue.

Thanks

 

Attachment(s)

vmsupport-2023-10-31-18-35.zip   9.71 MB 1 version

[JeffH322]

I'm seeing this issue as well - also with VMware Workstation Pro 17.5.0. I've been running VMware Workstation 16, 16.5, 17, and now 17.5 on the same workstation and have never seen this message before.

I was reading another post on the VMTN Communities:

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Player/Could-not-create-anonymous-paging-file-for-2048-MB-Insufficient/td-p/309915

Specifically, a post by  where there's mention of removing the following setting from the VMX file:

mainmem.useNamedFile = "false"

That would imply that the setting is in the VMX file by default; however, I do not see it in the VMX file for the Windows 11 VM in question on my endpoint.

I will try adding the option (setting it to true) and open a support ticket if the issue persists.

 

[rickpage]

Any success on this? I am not on 17.5 yet as I have been reading about all of the issues and having to downgrade. SO I am still at 17.0. It is strange that all of a sudden this is starting to happen and all of the Google searches turn up results dating back to 2007, 2009 and 2011. I have 64GB of RAM and my system is currently only using 29% of it. I would think that the paging file would actively not be in use right now. FYI. I have seen this error twice so far. first time was on VM startup and it had to be restarted. The second time was when the VM suspended and was trying to resume resulting in a restart.

[Michael LeWinter]

I had the same error when I moved to 17.5 and tried to start a suspended virtual machine.  I manually added this to my .vmx file:

mainmem.useNamedFile = "TRUE"

And was thus able to start my guest virtual machine.

[Kiriakos Valentin]

Hey,

I had the same error and setting mainmem.useNamedFile = "TRUE" in my .vmx file didn't do anything. Going though the .vmx file, I noticed that memsize was set to 8192MB. I tried to change it manually to the memory value I had setup in my VM settings. I then got another message saying that my allocated memory wasn't a multiple of 4MB. I calculated the adjustment and modified the allocated memory in my VM settings accordingly. This time, the memsize value in my .vmx file was updated automatically and I was able to launch my VM. 

I hope it helps someone.

[VMware Community Member]

Same Issue shows up on my VMware 17.5.1

I tried the solution above with mainmem.useNamedFile = "false" but this does not work for me.

Thanks

This post was removed

[Julio Camargo]

Greetings from Brasil

As it was the first link on the google when I searched, I believe that it deserves an answer:
In my case I had to manually set the virtual memory on host machine (W11), as this video shows. 

Please note that the amount of memory necessary will vary according to your setup. So set the maximun amount over the memory from VMware error message, in my case 22000 and I set to 30000.

I hope it helps

Have a good day and a good life!

[Julio Camargo]

Greetings from Brasil
As it was the first result on google search, I believe that an answer should be posted here. 

I got the solution from this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYeqvo4Qy80  and it suggests to manually set the virtual memory (paging file) on Host OS (W11).

I hope it helps as it did to me.
Forgive me for any english mistake.

Have a good day and a good life!

[Julio Camargo]

Greetings from Brasil

As it was the first link on the google when I searched, I believe that it deserves an answer:
In my case I had to manually set the virtual memory on host machine (W11), as this video shows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYeqvo4Qy80

Please note that the amount of memory necessary will vary according to your setup. So set the maximun amount over the memory from VMware error message, in my case 22000 and I set to 30000.

I hope it helps

Have a good day and a good life!

[RaSystemlord]

Not sure what kind of anwers you have already had, but the first memory configuration parameters are these:

- never exceed the memory that the Host can give you. Win 11 might take something like 6 GBs, if you don't do much with it ... or whatever up to 15 GBs in use that feels like normal (lots of pages on Web Browsers, many Web Browsers open, communication software ...)

- give a VM the memory that it really needs. You need to know that, it is your VM and your applications that you run there

If you cannot give enough for all the VMs that are running parallel, run less of them. Or buy a new computer where you can have more memory (like 64 GB or 128 GB in consumer models). Or upgrade the memory in your current PC, if you can ... upgrade memory means: take the current ones away and buy new, bigger ones ... there is seldom any other option.

There is no shortcut for that. If your Host is "like dying", you didn't follow the above and you are trying to use too much memory on the Host and then nothing works and it can even get stuck.

If you get that error message from VMware, your memory configuation in your VMs is wrong and VMware kindly tells that immediately.

By the way: never partition a disk for Windows. There is no reason for that. I know that PC Magazines recommended that,  but that was just because they didn't understand the concept of a folder ... or they used a sub-standard filesystem like FAT in DOS-Windows times (these times were left in 90s). However, if you need more drive letters, having VMs is not the reason, but if you do for pointing to data on somewhere else than C:, buy a new USB 3.2 Gen 2 disk, give it a new drive letter, and use that. The need for more drive letters is such a theoretical case that if you don't know what I mean, you don't need them. You can of course have another internal disk. Based on that you are trying to run 3 VMs at the same time, it is very likely that your system is such that you can do any of the suggestions above.