In vCloud Director (vCD) 5.x, you may have seen this error or heard a complaint from customer that when a new VM deployed, powering it on caused this error:

“The operation could not be performed, because there are insufficient memory resources” also “The available Memory resources in the parent resource pool are insufficient for the operation.”

This error might seem natural and you might suspect to the allocations of VDC but if the organization VDC is created using Allocation Pool model, the story is different. You sum up the memory assigned to all VMs and the total amount might be less than allocated amount in VDC. Most likely, it is because of the amount set in “Memory resources guaranteed” field of VDC. In fact, by default this is set to 20% and this value is the minimum number you can set. Since VMware reserves this amount of Memory, you should add it to the total amount (sum of all VMs) of RAM calculated before and then compare it to “Memory allocation”  that should be less or you will encounter the mentioned error message.

So, to prevent this error, you must be more generous in assigning “Memory allocated” value of VDC because reducing “Memory resources guaranteed” less than 20% is not possible!