I had habit of utilizing all memory on my VM when I had to test something. I have 32GB on my Lenovo so while building my VM I gave it 20+ GB. But after I realize that my work will require running more than 2 VMs at the same time I had to opt for Dynamic memory for my VM. I decrease RAM of my Single Server SharePoint 2013 VM from 2 to 16GB at startup. The VM is working great but I faced a problem in SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache. Please note that stopping Distributed Cache service will break many features in SharePoint especially social feeds.

While I had to do some testing I stopped my Distributed Cache Service.

When I tried to Start It and saw the error below.

A failure occurred SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance::Provision() Available memory is ‘10074’ MB, needed memory’20100′ MB.

I did some investigation to see how I can change the assigned memory to something more feasible like 6000 MB. I found this TechNet guide.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219613.aspx

First I checked the current allocation which is set to almost 20GB.

Use-CacheCluster

Get-AFCacheHostConfiguration -ComputerName SP2013 -CachePort “22233”

To update I ran the following command

Update-SPDistributedCacheSize -CacheSizeInMB 6000

I started the service.