High Ram Usage

[alperen5860]

I have 64 GB of RAM on my Proxmox server and I've set up 3 VMs, each with 16 GB of RAM. However, each VM is only using around 2.3 GB of RAM.

However, in the Proxmox panel, it shows that 44 GB of RAM is being used. Proxmox ballooning is active, and I have installed drivers for the Windows VM. Can anyone help?
Used disk local-lvm

 

[Dunuin]

Thats normal. Every OS will eat up all the RAM you throw at it as free RAM is wasted RAM. What PVE reports is the physical RAM thats actually being used.
Windows will report RAM used for caching as free in its graphs (and calls it available) while the RAM used for caching of cause is still in use and wasted as no other VMs or the PVE host itself can use it. And with the guest agent installed the PVE webUI will show the guests RAM usage as reported to it by Windows, so the PVE webUI will show "wrong" guest RAM usage too. "correct" guest RAM usage would be the high RAM utilization you see when not using the guest agent as then PVE will get the RAM utilization from KVM.
If you really want to know how much RAM your VM is using install "htop" on the PVE host and run it. Then have a look at the "RES" column of the kvm process that is virtualizing your VM. The used RAM could even be higher than 16GB as there is virtualization overhead. So the VM with 16GB RAM allocated could actually consume something like 17 or 18GB RAM or even way more in case you enable writeback caching.

And ballooning will only kick in once the PVE host exceeds 80% RAM usage. Below that PVE won't try to steal RAM from the guests.