Virtual machine memory

In contrast to storage and networking, most organizations will benefit from sizing virtual machine memory much differently than they would for physical deployments. It's not uncommon to order physical systems that have a calculated minimum rounded up to the next nice, even number such as four gigabytes. In other institutions, the price of RAM is low enough that it's not worth the administrative effort to calculate how much of RAM is optimal, so orders are made using a standard build template with a high amount of RAM such as 16 GB or more.

Practical virtual machine memory sizing

Obviously, allocating memory for virtual machines in the previous mentioned fashion would quickly deplete the resources of most hosts. In addition to the issue of overconsumption of available memory, this is also wasteful allocation. In a physical host, there's unlikely to be a large number of processes vying for access to that memory, so there's usually little or no harm done by building in...