How much Ram memory does VMWARE use?

[Oceatech]

Spoiler

I have a PowerEdge T140 from DELL.


I installed an Esxi 7.0.3

I have 1 Raid 1 of 1TB

I have 16 GB of RAM

I created 2 VMs, one for windows 10 pro and the other for a linux ubuntu 16.04

the recommendation of the software publishers to use on the VMs asks me for 8GB of RAM each

So I assigned to each VM 8GB of RAM

My question is :

Doesn't ESXI need RAM to work? How can I assign 8GB and 8GB and leave nothing for the ESXI and it still works?

[IRIX201110141]

It will works because of ESXi can compress, swapp Memory when it comes under pressure.  It will work... but the VM can be extremly slow down which ends up in unusable performance from a Guest OS perspective.  

Get more RAM.

Read https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.esxi.upgrade.doc/GUID-DEB8086A-306B-4239-BF...

Regards,
Joerg