Get 16GB of RAM for your homelab.

Yes, 16GB is enough for three lightweight VMs — and you shouldn’t try to make 8GB work with aggressive ballooning.

Ballooning is a last-resort mechanism. It works, but it’s not something you want to rely on in a homelab. Your VMs will feel sluggish when the hypervisor starts reclaiming memory, especially if any of them actually need the RAM. Three lightweight VMs will happily run on 16GB with some headroom for the host overhead (vCenter, ESXi itself, maybe a small vSAN or backup VM). Ballooning kicks in only if you overcommit heavily — which you’d be doing with 8GB.

16GB DDR4 or DDR3 is cheap, even for server-grade memory. You can find used sticks for under $50. The time you’ll spend tuning ballooning and debugging random slowdowns isn’t worth the $20 you’d save.

Get 16GB, set your reservations smartly, and move on to actually playing with VMware features.