SharePoint 2013 PowerPivot + Dynamic Memory in a VM

This is a ‘quick press’ for something that I just noticed by way of my colleague Bryan.  When you are spinning up your SharePoint 2013 environments and getting everything good to go, it is important to consider memory demand when you are in VMs on Windows 2012.  If the current demand for memory is too low when PowerPivot spins up, Windows can’t give it more RAM fast enough and it will throw and exception saying, not enough memory.

I’ve seen this with other high impact services using the new Dynamic Memory stuff in Windows 2012, namely SQL.  The best advice I can give for now is to use Static Memory allocations for SharePoint and SQL.  I hear rumors that Dynamic Memory is getting a performance tune up in an upcoming CU for Windows but that remains to be seen.

Bottom line – Dynamic Memory is amazing, but there is a tradeoff in how fast it can get more RAM to a running VM and how many VMs you can effectively run.  Balance!