Compute

The following diagram shows how a VM gets its resources from ESXi. It is a pretty complex diagram, so let me walk you through it. We are using RAM as the example, although the concept applies to CPU too:

How a VM gets its resources

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

Unlike a physical server, you can configure a Limit and a Reservation in a VM. 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 SDDC operations 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 have not shown a solid line and used an italic font style...