I have a Windows 2008 R2 64 bit virtual machine on ESXi 4.1 host. The host reports that the virtual machine is actively using less than 1 GB of memory. But, in Windows it's reporting the machine is using 7 GB of memory, even though the total of the processes listed in task manager is less than 1 GB. The machine is rather unresponsive and I'm concerned this is impacting other applications (server's purpose is to run ASP.NET state server process, which has been having trouble and led me to spot the memory question).
I just noticed High memory usage Windows Server 2008r2 on VMware and will be looking through those documents more, but what is causing this?
Best Answer
You can run RAMMap in the vm to find out how Windows is using the memory.
If Windows isn't under memory pressure, it doesn't bother to make any memory free, so memory can accumulate that is technically used but not really used. The OS assumes that there is zero cost associated with memory that is used if there's still enough available memory to meet foreseeable demand.