Windows 2012r2 balloon driver using all memory

Sep 8, 2016
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I have a strange issue with the balloon driver on a machine of mine.

With the balloon driver enabled and the service running, the memory usage inside the VM will increase until it gets to the 98% limit that windows has on memory usage. None of the processes inside the VM show any significant usage. The usage reported to proxmox matches that of what the guest sees.

Stopping the balloon service does nothing; the total usage remains the same.

Stopping the balloon service and then disabling the driver very quickly frees up all the memory that isn't in use by any processes. Enabling the driver either immediately starts consuming memory again or does so over 30 minutes. However, while this increase in memory usage is displayed in the summary for that particular VM, the total memory usage of the host remains unchanged.

I've not seen this behaviour on any other windows machine running on the cluster.

The VM is using .126 version of the virtio drivers.

Package versions
Code:
proxmox-ve: 4.3-72 (running kernel: 4.4.21-1-pve)
pve-manager: 4.3-12 (running version: 4.3-12/6894c9d9)
pve-kernel-4.4.6-1-pve: 4.4.6-48
pve-kernel-4.4.21-1-pve: 4.4.21-71
pve-kernel-4.4.16-1-pve: 4.4.16-64
pve-kernel-4.4.24-1-pve: 4.4.24-72
pve-kernel-4.4.19-1-pve: 4.4.19-66
lvm2: 2.02.116-pve3
corosync-pve: 2.4.0-1
libqb0: 1.0-1
pve-cluster: 4.0-47
qemu-server: 4.0-96
pve-firmware: 1.1-10
libpve-common-perl: 4.0-83
libpve-access-control: 4.0-19
libpve-storage-perl: 4.0-68
pve-libspice-server1: 0.12.8-1
vncterm: 1.2-1
pve-docs: 4.3-17
pve-qemu-kvm: 2.7.0-8
pve-container: 1.0-85
pve-firewall: 2.0-31
pve-ha-manager: 1.0-38
ksm-control-daemon: 1.2-1
glusterfs-client: 3.5.2-2+deb8u2
lxc-pve: 2.0.6-1
lxcfs: 2.0.5-pve1
criu: 1.6.0-1
novnc-pve: 0.5-8
smartmontools: 6.5+svn4324-1~pve80
zfsutils: 0.6.5.8-pve13~bpo80
openvswitch-switch: 2.6.0-2
 
I have the same situation here, but not for 1 VM but for all of them...
 

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