"Just shutdown the VM and edit settings for RAM whatever you want to add."
And how would you do that when the VM you shut down *is* vCenter? In 5.5 you can't edit the VM's without vCenter because you need the web client.
There should be an easy solution for this, and from what I'm reading throughout this forum, VMWare hasn't thought of it yet: a scheduled memory increase. We need an option IN THE WEB CLIENT (since we have to use it now), to say "The next time this VM reboots, change the ram from amount X to amount Y." Ironically, this option is exactly how you upgrade the VM hardware from version 8 or 9 to 10, etc.