RAM usage massive over VMs RAM size

[fre4ki]

Hey guys,

i‘m new with proxmox. I have installed it bare metal with a Intel NUC (64 GB RAM).

I created 2 VMs (one with 6 GB and Linux and one with 8 GB RAM and Windows Server 2016). So i think the RAM usage should be somewhere between 14 GB - 16 GB? The RAM usage is more than 42 GB now.

On the attachement there are 2 screenshots. The RAM is really assigned (htop output).

I tried it already with balooning and the baloon driver and without. Does not matter.

Hope someone can help.

Andy

 

[hmeco]

have you installed balloon drivers on you´r windows boxes they "should" resove this..
Proxmox can show "false" readings on windows boxes..
but as you can se on screenshot Ive sent, there vm´s are chilling.
One of them are running, ActiveDirectory and DNS and the 2nd is full 2019 exchange (cu4), becides that i also run proxmox mail gateway <3 <3 <3 <3 killed more than 300k spam mails.

Also how have you configured you´re vms?
Also, are you running windows with desktop enviroment? (that normaly chews 4-6 gig alone)

 

[fre4ki]

Here are RAM usage / RAM configuration. The Windows with balooning is min. 4096 and max. 8192.

the usage should be in total (both VMs) about 7-8 GB in total.

 

[hmeco]

as long as that correspond to the vm´s then it should be mine are totaly off, and if i put vms to work, then in theory the server should "puke".. they are just fine.. i ignore thouse stats on windows vm´s. (thats my personal experience).. and on servers you dont need desktop enviroment ^^

 

[fre4ki]

Mhmm.. I totally assigned in 2 VMs 14 GBs of RAM. And proxmox consuming much more. I understand if it is only the web graph but htop tell me such high consumption too.

 

[hmeco]

Mine proxmox is "eating" the memory assigned. It shows that its using it, but in fact its reserving them.
Just a side question, how are your drives setup? (on the box itself)

 

[fre4ki]

1 SATA SSD for Installation
1 NVME (1 TB) for ZFS (Data)

 

[hmeco]

ZFS is the one chewing you´r memory. ive had it on my server with 32gig of mem. and it chewed it like candy. Even more i have 6 SSD´s in it.. and the preformance on the system was terrible. With that setup id rather run with ext4 (like i do now) you will have better benefits, unless you ofc. use all thouse nice features that ZFS has to offer..

Over the time, you will also experience high I/O Delay

 

[fre4ki]

I read somewhere that ZFS is consuming 4 GB + 1 GB per TB. This where 5 GB + 14 (worst case) for the VMs. But it is consuming much more..

 

[fre4ki]

I moved the VM-Images to an NFS Datastore. The RAM is now fine. Looks like dedupe and compression uses this RAM.

 

[hmeco]

I read somewhere that ZFS is consuming 4 GB + 1 GB per TB. This where 5 GB + 14 (worst case) for the VMs. But it is consuming much more..

I dont think that there is a exsact calculation on how much ZFS consumes, as far as i know (from a friend that works as a infrastructure administrator) that there is no point of using ZFS if you´re not using the rich features it has to offer. If you want it, then it should be tweaked to your system specific.