I recently added a new VM in ProxMox for various web services. I originally allocated a minimum of 8GB of RAM with ballooning available to 16 GB. All seemed to be well until I tried installing Collabora, when the VM basically locked up for several hours. Looking at ProxMox, it was using 104% of the allocated processor time for that whole time, but only 5% of the allocated RAM. When I ran the free –mega command on the VM, it told me that there is only 938 MB total RAM in the system.
free –mega
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 938 715 99 71 350 223
Swap: 1022 672 349
I have way more than enough RAM in the bare metal server (120 GB) to allocate 8/16 GB of RAM to this VM, but the Debian OS installed in the VM only sees 938 MB. This is not a problem with any of the other VMs I have, including the other Debian VM I spun up the same day. I have tried disabling the ballooning, and even reducing the RAM to 4 GB to see if it will shake something loose, but I never get a different amount of RAM from free, and the memory usage graph never, ever goes above the 900 MB area:
Everything I find when I search for issues are about VMs trying to use too much RAM or maxing out the RAM. I can’t find anything about the guest OS not seeing 95% of the RAM. Does anyone have any ideas?