The following diagram shows how a VM gets its resource from ESXi. It is a pretty complex diagram, so let me walk you through it.

The tall rectangular area represents a VM. Say this VM is given 8 GB of virtual RAM. The bottom line represents 0 GB and the top line represents 8 GB. The VM is configured with 8 GB RAM. We call this Provisioned. This is what the Guest OS sees, so if it is running Windows, you will see 8 GB RAM when you log into Windows.

Unlike a physical server, you can configure a Limit and a Reservation. This is done outside the Guest OS, so Windows or Linux does not know. You should minimize the use of Limit and Reservation as it makes the operation more complex.

Entitlement means what the VM is entitled to. In this example, the hypervisor entitles the VM to a certain amount of memory. I did not show a solid line and used an italic font style to mark that Entitlement is not a fixed value, but a dynamic value determined by the hypervisor. It varies every minute, determined...