Hi, I am currently testing VMWare ESXi on a test machine. My host machine has 4gigs of ram. I have three guests and each is assigned a memory limit of 1 GB (and only 512 MB reserved).

The host summary screen shows a memory capacity of 4082.55 MB and a usage of 2828 MB with two guests running. This seems to make sense, two gigs for each VM plus an overhead for the host. 800MB seems high but that is still reasonable.

But on the Resource Allocation Screen I see a memory capacity of 2356 MB and an available capacity of 596 MB.

Under the configuration tab, memory link I see a physical total of 4082.5 MB, System of 531.5 MB and VM of 3551.0 MB.

I have only allocated my VMs for a gig each, and with two VMs running they are taking up almost two times the amount of ram allocated. Why is this, and why does the Resource Allocation screen short change me so much?