Human resources users report their payroll system is running slow. An administrator monitors performance and notices the VM that runs the payroll system is showing very high memory utilization. Additi

Establishing memory hard limits would restrict the VM's access to memory, potentially further degrading performance for the payroll system if its actual working set exceeds the limit.

High swap file activity on the host indicates that the physical memory of the virtualization host is overcommitted and the host operating system is frequently moving data between RAM and disk. Increasing the physical memory on the virtualization host provides more resources for all running VMs, directly addressing the underlying memory contention problem.

Establishing memory soft limits provides guidance for hypervisor memory management but does not resolve the fundamental issue of insufficient physical memory on the host.

Decreasing memory allocation on other VMs might temporarily alleviate the issue for the payroll VM, but it simply shifts the performance problem to other workloads and doesn't address the overall host memory deficit.