I have a Gaming VM (Win10) set up using my NVMe drive in passthrough and am really happy with it. The system I built is more economical than performance but having gamed of a laptop for the past 10 years I find it more than I need.

 

I'm running into one problem though, and it's more of an OCD issue than a real problem.

 

I originally set the Gaming VM to use 16GB or Ram for Startup and Max - and as I said that is working fine. But I noticed that my memory reports as 62% used in the Unraid dashboard... Even when I'm not currently using the VM (But it is running).

 

I tried changing the numbers to 8GB - 16GB (I'd actually set it to 24GM if this worked) but it changed the max memory to 8GB when I started the VM. I assume this is because Memballoon is set to none.

 

I tried turning memballoon on but don't know what to confugure the PCI address as.

 

I did find one that worked... but even with it running my dashboard sits at 62% Memory Usage.

 

Am I just not understanding what it should look like?

 

Should I avoid this in general to keep the performance of the VM optimal?

 

Here's my current XML for the VM:

 

Arbadacarba

Win10XML.txt

Are you looking at overall usage i.e. including ram cache?

Linux actively uses RAM to cache write and reports it as not-free but once required, it can easily be freed up automatically.

 

In fact, 62% usage means 38% wasted RAM. You want as close 100% as possible.

I'm not certain... I'm going by the Dashboard.

 

Here it is without the VM running:

 

 

And here it is with the VM running:

 

If you have more than one vm you can save memory by enabling the kvm Kernel Samepage Merging feature eg: 2 windows vms etc

Though I do have multiple VMS only one runs all the time.