The administrator wants to power on VM-K2, which has a 2GHz CPU reservation. VM-M1, VM-M2, and VM-K1 are all powered on. VM-K2 is not powered on. The exhibit shows the parent and child resource reserv

Even though RP-KID has expandable reservation enabled, that feature only allows the child pool to borrow unreserved resources from the parent pool. With VM-K1 already powered on and consuming RP-KID's existing 2GHz reservation, and VM-K2 requiring another 2GHz, the expandable reservation would attempt to borrow from the parent - but if the parent resource pool also lacks sufficient unreserved capacity (as the exhibit indicates with the other VMs running), the power-on operation fails. There are simply no resources left in the hierarchy to satisfy the reservation.

RP-KID's 2GHz reservation is already consumed by VM-K1 which is powered on, so there is no available reservation within RP-KID itself for VM-K2.

This partially identifies the problem but is incomplete - with expandable reservation enabled, the pool would attempt to borrow from its parent rather than being strictly limited to its own 2GHz, but borrowing fails because the parent has no remaining unreserved capacity.

vSphere resource pools have no 'resource priority' mechanism that can override a genuine lack of available resources in the hierarchy.