This is more of a discussion point than a informational Post. I've been trying to find out about what is the best practice for an ESX Hosts System Resource Reservation (Not Resource Pools). What values to use? And should I dive deeper and apply/remove reservations from System Resource Pools (See Screenshot).

I've been reading through these two VMware documents but nothing obvious seems to jump out at me.

• vSphere Resource Management Guide
• Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere® 4.0

It mostly just explains about how Shares/Reservations/Limits and standard Resource Pooling, which I think I already understand well.

Before I moved over to ESXi, it was part of my build document to Reserve 800MB of RAM for the COS. Do I need to reserve anything now? What do you do?

1. Do you just set a simple CPU and Memory System Resource Reservation? If so what values and why?
2. Do you dive deeper into the Advanced System Resource Pool Reservations? If so, Why?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Note: I am not talking about Resource Pools. I'm talking about The System Resource Allocation section on the Config tab of an ESX Host. (As seen below)