Two sibling resource pools named RP-CHILD-A and RP-CHILD-B have these configurations: - RP-CHILD-A has an expandable reservation and memory shares set to 2000' with 10 VMs, each with 4GB of RAM - RP-C

The pools have different absolute share values (2000 vs. 4000), so they do not receive the same entitlement - RP-CHILD-B receives twice the pool-level allocation of RP-CHILD-A.

vSphere always uses shares to arbitrate resource allocation during contention; the expandable reservation setting only allows borrowing unused capacity from a parent pool, not bypassing share-based arbitration.

RP-CHILD-A has 2000 shares divided among 10 VMs, yielding 200 effective shares per VM, while RP-CHILD-B has 4000 shares divided among 30 VMs, yielding roughly 133 effective shares per VM. As long as no VMs are added or removed, each VM in RP-CHILD-A will consistently receive proportionally more memory than each VM in RP-CHILD-B during contention because of this per-VM share advantage.

VMs in RP-CHILD-B receive fewer effective shares per VM (approximately 133) compared to RP-CHILD-A (200) because the larger share pool is split across three times as many VMs.