Understanding Memory Assignments

[artomason]

I want to start by apologizing if this is a rather elementary question.

I have recently built up an ESXi host and I'm starting to deploy guests, but I'm uncertain on how to handle assigning memory to each of the guests. I'm coming from Hyper-V, and I was able to configure guests using Dynamic Memory previously. In my case I have a Window Server 2016 guest with 2x vCPU and 4096MB of memory assigned, although it only needs 2048, and in many cases can run with less if not under load. What I would like to do is specify a absolute minimum (reserve?) and maximum (limit?) that the guest can use, but I would like unused memory to not be allocated to the guest unless it is needed. What would be the best way to configure this?

Windows Server 2016

Assigned Memory: 2048

Reserve: 1024

Limit: 4096

With the above I would assume that memory would never drop below 1024, would not go above 4096, and I'm not sure where the 2048 would come into play at this point.

[daphnissov]

If you're just starting with ESXi, here's a tip:  Don't mess with limits and reservations. They don't do what you probably think they do. Simply assign the amount of memory to a VM you wish it to have and be done. That memory entitles the VM to use memory up to but not more than that amount.