CompTIA Cloud+ Practice Test

In a virtual machine environment experiencing slower performance under load, what could be the cause if the hypervisor is lacking physical RAM?

1. More physical RAM is required

2. More virtual RAM is required

3. More physical CPUs are required

4. More vCPUs are required

The correct answer is: More physical RAM is required

In a virtual machine environment, if the hypervisor is lacking physical RAM, it can lead to degraded performance when the system is under load. The hypervisor manages resources for multiple virtual machines (VMs), and when it doesn't have enough physical RAM to allocate to these VMs, they may experience slowdowns or run inadequately because they are forced to use paging techniques, which are significantly slower. Having more physical RAM allows the hypervisor to allocate sufficient memory to each virtual machine, ensuring that they can operate efficiently without having to swap data in and out of the slower component storage. This is particularly critical for operations that require high memory usage or for applications running within those VMs that are sensitive to latency and performance constraints. Increasing virtual RAM allocation (the amount of memory assigned to each virtual machine) or adding vCPUs (virtual CPUs), while potentially helpful, will not resolve the fundamental issue of insufficient physical RAM at the hypervisor level. If the hypervisor does not have enough physical RAM, simply allocating more virtual resources can still lead to performance bottlenecks due to the main limitation being the physical hardware's RAM capacity.