Windows – Virtual Machine memory usage not appearing in TaskManager

memorytask-managervirtualizationwindows

There's something about Windows memory management and it's relationship to TaskManager that I don't understand and I'm hoping someone can enlighten me.

If I'm running a virtual machine (doesn't matter if it's Virtual PC 2007, Virtual Server 2005, or VirtualBox since they act the same way) and bring up TaskManager I can see on the processes tab some entries for the VM but the memory values are fairly small (around 30 MB). Obviously it's not including the memory actually being consumed by the VM itself. None of the various Memory-related columns you can make visible appear to work differently. The Memory usage on the Performance tab appears to be correct for total memory usage including the VM.

So my question is why doesn't the VM's memory usage (which will be 100's of MB) show up on the Processes tab?

Best Answer

VirtualPC, HyperV and probably similar products use something called driver locked memory, which is not visible in Process Explorer, Task Manager, etc. RAMMap will show you driver locked memory used by a process.