On Tue, 13 Nov 2001 17:26:22 -0600
"Amy Tanner" <amy at real-time.com> wrote:

> is there any rule of thumb for how much memory to allocate to guest
> OS of vmware?

The OS developer's suggestions are just as valid in vmware as in a real machine. That said, the developers often low-ball the requirements to make you buy the product. MS claims that Win95 will run on 4MB of RAM, but what a mess that would be. My Win32 guidelines are: 

32-48MB for Win95
64+ MB for Win98/SE

128+ MB for Linux / BSD.

I allocate 128MB for Win98SE in my own setup. I also have 512MB of real RAM to work with.

> can someone explain how vmware allocates the memory
> to the guest OS?  thanks.

AFAIK, vmware reserves all the RAM at the time you boot the virtual machine, but that should be easy enough to test. Have you considered searching the vmware-news archives for this information?

Bill