Ballooning

[Matteo Calorio]

Good morning,

on a node of our cluster with 1TB of RAM occupied at 60% we have a problem with ballooning.

Specifically, on a windows server 2019 VM with 128GB of RAM:



On the node with Proxmox VE 6.4-13 with Community subscription we see this:

$ free
                      total        used        free      shared           buff/cache   available
Mem:     1056786420   625599072     4972048      101240            426215300   424507268
Swap:     134217724    11693432   122524292

Virtio 0.1.171 drivers are installed on the VM.

Why does ballooing happen and how can we solve the problem?

Thanks,
Matteo

 

[leesteken]

on a node of our cluster with 1TB of RAM occupied at 60% we have a problem with ballooning.

According to the documentation, ballooning only starts taking away memory from VMs when the host is at 80% memory usage.

Specifically, on a windows server 2019 VM with 128GB of RAM:

View attachment 42077

What is the problem you are having? I don't know Windows well enough to interpret this picture.

On the node with Proxmox VE 6.4-13 with Community subscription we see this:

Please note that Proxmox VE 6 is end of life and out of support.

$ free
                      total        used        free      shared           buff/cache   available
Mem:     1056786420   625599072     4972048      101240            426215300   424507268
Swap:     134217724    11693432   122524292

Virtio 0.1.171 drivers are installed on the VM.

Why does ballooing happen and how can we solve the problem?

Is ballooning actually happening? If you enter info balloon in the Monitor tab of the VM (or use qm monitor on the Proxmox host), what does it show?

 

[Matteo Calorio]

According to the documentation, ballooning only starts taking away memory from VMs when the host is at 80% memory usage.

Yes, this is precisely the problem, it seems to me that it already happens to us at 60%.

What is the problem you are having? I don't know Windows well enough to interpret this picture.

The image indicates that there are 43.248.196 KB out of 128 GB of RAM occupied by a dummy process created by ballooning.

Please note that Proxmox VE 6 is end of life and out of support.

Thanks, we plan to upgrade to Proxmox 7 shortly.

Is ballooning actually happening? If you enter info balloon in the Monitor tab of the VM (or use qm monitor on the Proxmox host), what does it show?

# info balloon

balloon: actual=83959 max_mem=131072 total_mem=131071 free_mem=4398 mem_swapped_in=19489550336 mem_swapped_out=5272887296 major_page_faults=716651 minor_page_faults=349576678 last_update=1665479857

Thanks,
Matteo