VMWare Workstation: Not enough memory my ass!

The Problem

I have a Elementary OS VMWare guest that I leave running nearly full time on one of my Windows 8.1 (x86_64/Pro) machines. Today when I came in to work, the guest was shut down with some error dialogs blabing about lack of physical memory.

The host in question has 16 GiB and at the time had ~7.5 GiB free. Why is VMWare complaining I don’t have enough physical memory all of a sudden for a guest that needs 4 GiB?

OK, maye a glitch. Just restart VMWare…

A bit more descriptive, but equally as annoying and doesn’t make much sense given the free RAM I have.

The Cause

A quick Google brought up a VMWare blog entry: Workstation 10 issue with recent Microsoft Windows 8.1 Update. VMWare suggests you remove KB2995388 to fix this. Remove over 20 fixes and security updates you say? No thanks VMWare!

The Fix

This fix, at least for me comes from the comments:

Open up the %ProgramData%\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini in your favorite editor and add the following line:

vmmon.disableHostParameters = "TRUE"

Reboot. Viola!

Note that I’m using Windows 8.1 x86_64 Pro and VMWare Workstation 9.0.2 build-1031769