Configure at least the required amount of memory for a virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 and enabled for Dynamic Memory

• Applies to:

  ✅ Windows Server 2025, ✅ Windows Server 2022, ✅ Windows Server 2019, ✅ Windows Server 2016, ✅ Windows 11, ✅ Windows 10, ✅ Azure Local, versions 23H2 and 22H2

For more information about best practices and scans, see Run Best Practices Analyzer Scans and Manage Scan Results.

Property	Details
Operating System	Windows Server 2016
Product/Feature	Hyper-V
Severity	Error
Category	Configuration

In the following sections, italics indicates UI text that appears in the Best Practices Analyzer tool for this issue.

Issue

One or more virtual machines are configured to use Dynamic Memory with less than the amount of memory required for Windows Server 2012 R2.

Impact

The guest operating system on the following virtual machines might not run or might run unreliably:

<list of virtual machines>

Resolution

Use Hyper-V Manager to increase the minimum memory to at least 256 MB, and the startup memory and maximum memory to at least 512 MB for this virtual machine.

Increase memory using Hyper-V Manager

1. Open Hyper-V Manager. (From Server Manager, click Tools > Hyper-V Manager.)

2. From the list of virtual machines, right-click the one you want, then click Settings.

3. In the navigation pane, click Memory.

4. Change the RAM to at least 512 MB.

5. Under Dynamic Memory, change the Minimum RAM to at least 256 MB and the Maximum RAM to 512 MB.

6. Click OK.

Increase memory using Windows PowerShell

1. Open Windows PowerShell. (From the desktop, click Start and start typing Windows PowerShell.)

2. Right-click Windows PowerShell and click Run as administrator.

3. Run a command similar to the following, replacing MyVM with the name of your virtual machine and the memory values with at least the values shown below.

Get-VM MyVM | Set-VMMemory -DynamicMemoryEnabled $True -MaximumBytes 512MB -MinimumBytes 256MB -StartupBytes 512MB