VM10 doing nothing but using 16GB RAM

[SPOautos]

Hey guys, I had a VM10 going, just sitting there doing nothing. I've not even started doing anything with it yet. I basically had set it up then connected Splashtop to it and its just been sitting there for a couple days. I've noticed my RAM use has been high at around 70+% for a couple days now but I have been doing a lot of data transfers over the past couple days and thought that was reason. Today, I was finished moving data and I let the server just sit there but the RAM never went down, one by one I shut down all of the dockers and it went from 73% to 63%. Finally I closed the windows 10 VM that I didnt even remember was started and my RAM dropped to 11% utilization. This means the W10VM started using around 52% of the RAM which is approx 16GB and I've never even done anything with it. Its just been sitting there dormant.

 

Is there a particular reason for this? I can do pinning to reduce its ability to use a lot of RAM but that doesnt explain what the VM is doing that is causing such high useage. I wish I would have opened task manager before I closed it, but I didnt think to do that. I really wasnt expecting that to be the problem. Also the RAM dropped just by me pulling up the VM, selecting start then power off.....in Unraid the VM is still in its started state, so I really just shut down W10, not the VM itself.

 

Any thoughts/education for me?

[Squid]

The minute you start a VM, all the ram you've set for it is allocated by the host.  Normal, and how it should work.

[SPOautos]

2 minutes ago, Squid said:

The minute you start a VM, all the ram you've set for it is allocated by the host.  Normal, and how it should work.

 

Thank you.....I just restarted it twice from scratch and noticed that in task manager it showed 16GB available and only 1.5GB in use then realized I was seeing 16GB used in Unraid because the VM must be blocking it off or something.

 

I did not realize that when I gave the VM a certain amount of RAM that it was going to block it off from Unraid. I figured Unraid would get to use whatever the Windows VM was not using.....but as fast as RAM use can change I can see why it would be necessary to just block it off or reserve it.

 

@Squid is there a way to copy the VM where I can have one that only reserves like 4GB of RAM that stays up all the time, then have a second one that is only opened when my son is playing games that uses 16GB of RAM?  Would I have to buy another w10 licence to do that?  Maybe I should try a different OS for gaming like the Steam one (which I know nothing about)???  I guess my question is, do I have to buy a 2nd license for that or can I just easily copy it and assign the copy a different RAM amount?

[AceRimmer]

1 hour ago, SPOautos said:

 

Thank you.....I just restarted it twice from scratch and noticed that in task manager it showed 16GB available and only 1.5GB in use then realized I was seeing 16GB used in Unraid because the VM must be blocking it off or something.

 

I did not realize that when I gave the VM a certain amount of RAM that it was going to block it off from Unraid. I figured Unraid would get to use whatever the Windows VM was not using.....but as fast as RAM use can change I can see why it would be necessary to just block it off or reserve it.

 

@Squid is there a way to copy the VM where I can have one that only reserves like 4GB of RAM that stays up all the time, then have a second one that is only opened when my son is playing games that uses 16GB of RAM?  Would I have to buy another w10 licence to do that?  Maybe I should try a different OS for gaming like the Steam one (which I know nothing about)???  I guess my question is, do I have to buy a 2nd license for that or can I just easily copy it and assign the copy a different RAM amount?

You can create a 2nd VM (call it something else), copy the XML from the first VM (the vm that currently uses 16GB of ram) paste it into the 2nd VM and then edit the ram allowances on the second VM & set the Primary vDisk Location to manual and select the same vdisk as the original VM.

 

Basically you are going to run two different configs but use the same virtual disk. The original for gaming with 16 gb of ram and maybe a few more cores & one for regular daily use with less ram and maybe less cores depending on your use case. 

[Squid]

1 hour ago, SPOautos said:

is there a way to copy the VM where I can have one that only reserves like 4GB of RAM that stays up all the time, then have a second one that is only opened when my son is playing games that uses 16GB of RAM? 

What this is called is memory ballooning, which unraid does support, but AFAIK only the server editions of Windows support (and even there only a few people in the world would have a clue about how to actually use it).  Separate VMs is a decent workaround.

 

Best solution is more memory on the server itself.