Recently I had a virtual machine set to use 2gb ram which I was trying to run in VMware Player on my work laptop which also has 2gb phyiscal memory.

I don’t have the full workstation license for my laptop so I couldn’t edit the image and modify the ram but I did find a quick and dirty hack by going into the vmx file, which is a simple text file, and altering the settings there.

All I needed to do was power down my virtual maching and then open up the .vmx in gedit or similar text editor and then locate the following line:

memsize = "2064"

I changed the value to “512”, problem solved.

You can do this for a number of different settings which I haven’t tested, but be careful. Make a backup copy of your virtual machine, it is possible to screw something up this way.