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Why the fuck does a windows server 2016 guest with ballooning service on proxmox take the full 10GB RAM from the host I assign to it?

I have installed all the virtio drivers and it does show in the guest summary itself the real usage of 1GB RAM, but if I check in htop or the datacenter summary, it shows the usage is 10/11GB all the time.

Comments
  • 0
    What's running on it?
  • 2
    If I recall correctly it formats RAM to it's own strange format so it's using almost full memory at all time unfortunately.
  • 0
    @Jilano Nothing really its basically idle
  • 0
    @SystemZ the windows guest or proxmox?
  • 0
    @JoshBent Oh? Weird...

    @SystemZ Didn't know about that. I tried Proxmox a long time ago. Might give it a try to check that RAM issue.
  • 1
    It would really suck if the free resources can't be freed, since I would like to not only have that one windows server running
  • 0
    it's not just cached on the host?
  • 1
    @Pavr I don't think so
  • 0
    did you install the kvm-guest-drivers on the windows guest?
    https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/...
  • 1
    @Pavr I did install the virtio driver for ballooning, yes
  • 1
    Then i don't know. GL ☺️
  • 0
    @Pavr Thanks 😥
  • 1
    @JoshBent Windows have this strange RAM behaviour, it's not Proxmox fault because Linux guest works ok. I have around 200 KVM guests in production on Proxmox.
  • 0
    @SystemZ Should I be worried though? or does proxmox handle the RAM on itself, since I know that if linux gets choked on RAM it loves to just kill the processes that take most RAM..
  • 1
    @JoshBent If you don't assign more RAM to VMs than you have on host then you are ok. Remember to leave some 300-1000MB free on host just to be sure.
  • 0
    @SystemZ Is there no way in auto managing it? since it wouldve been great to set a max usage top to the server, so if it needs more ram, it can get it from the pool, instead of swallowing the full 10GB all the time..
  • 1
    @JoshBent I wouldn't recommend it. Ballooning works with Linux but I don't know about Windows, using all RAM on idle doesn't sound good.
  • 0
    @SystemZ Wow I will really need a lot of ram if nobody comes through with some magical solution, maybe someone else knows one, thanks for now though!
  • 0
    @JoshBent; I believe the balloon driver still does it's thing. You just need to be careful not to overcommit. IE, when memory is needed elseware, the balloon driver will free it.
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