I have a question about coexisting VMs and memory management. I am trying out VMWare server (2.0.1) on a Windows 2003 standard host. I have three virtual machines set up, (A) Suse Linux with Nagios software, (B) Windows 2000 with bug tracking and (C) Windows 2003 with nothing (so far) installed. The server has 4GB of memory, assigned to the vms A - 1GB, B - 128MB, C - 1GB. All of these vms are idle and only in the testing phase. I did have C set to use 3GB, then 2GB of memory but in both cases when VM C starts working (booting up, running any installations/updates) the host and all VMs would grind to an unresponsive state for several minutes. When this happens the freeze up is due to memory swapping/paging. My question is what configuration should I be looking at and what guidelines should be followed to make the best use of the system's memory without causing this issue. With the current memory settings, when only powering on any machine by itself, or when powering on A&B together no freeze up occurs.
I hope I have given the right details, feel free to ask for clarification. Thanks for helping me start to learn VMWare.