tomd

I have this same problem. Was this ever resopved?

@JorgeB Why is that your recommendation? Isn't what the OP is describing normal virt-io memory ballooning operation for a Windows VM? Yes, Task Manager shows 97% utilization, but that doesn't matter. If you look at the stats on the host, you'll see that it has only allocated what the VM actually needs, which expands and contracts. This is the purpose of memory ballooning. You suggestion pre-allocates 100% of the memory to the VM so it can't be utilized by the host or by other VMs or containers. This seems less than ideal to me. @Seraph42 I would suggest putting it back to how you had it before and disregard the 97% in the task manager. It's not actually using all that RAM, it's just cosmetic. It's just the way the KVM Hypervisor manages memory allotment to its VMs.

I am running into the exact same situation that you have discribed. I have installed about 10 different linux distros ranging from lightweight AntiX to fatty Ubuntu, Arch based, and Red Hat based... They all do what you have outlined. They are supposed to use virt-io ballooning to dynamically grow and shrink between what is specified in the VM config but they never grow: Virtio balloon device: VM config: Htop: While troubleshooting, I decided to disable the virtio memory ballon PCI device to see what would happen. Remove PCI device: Htop: The bare metal memory usage didn't spike after removing it so it seemed promising. To continue testing, I opened a crap-ton of tabs and saw the memory usage was able to surpass the initial 2.5G, which was good: The issue I ran into was that when I closed the browser, memory usage in the VM decreased, but the host never reclaimed any of it. Before VM start: VM running and virtio balloon device removed: After opening a lot of tabs then closing them: So, in short... yeah, it's broken. no idea why, but it seems to be specific to unraid as the same VM config in proxmox grows and reclaims memory properly: I'm new to unraid but, IMO, unraid's hypervisor is subpar...