I've got a Dell 2950 running ESXi. I'm having weird issues in one of the VMs and I would like to do a memory test to eliminate (or identify) faulty RAM as the problem.
What is the easiest/fastest tool for me to use to do an exhaustive test of the system memory?
It would be nice if the tool came as a bootable CD/DVD image so I can shut down my server, boot from CD/DVD, do the test, then boot as usual when it's complete.
memtest.org is exactly what you're looking for.
If you still have the diagnostics boot partition that Dell installs at the factory up you can just boot into it and run the memory tests.
Dell might also have a bootable ISO image. I'm checking for that now and will posted an update if found.
You can download and burn the System rescue CD and run memtest off of it. It will take a while, but it will be exhaustive.
I really like the windiag memory test from Microsoft. It runs off of a bootable CDRom. I have seen this test running in the Advanced mode (press T when it starts) find memory problems that other tests have missed. http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp
EDIT: Having said that - advanced mode is not particularly fast. It runs through 11 exhaustive tests, so it may take an hour or considerably more depending on how much memory is in the system.
