ESXi host memory usage seems high with no VMs running

[timr88]

I have set up an ESXi 6.0 Update 1 installation on a HP ProLiant Microserver Gen8. This is using the HP-provided image for ProLiant servers.

With no VMs running the host memory usage is 1714 MB, which seems high to me. The only config changes I have made on the ESXi host are SSH was enabled and NTP client was configured.

I've run esxtop in memory (M) mode and the two processes using the most memory are hostd and vpxa - I don't see any custom HP processes in the list eating RAM.

I've tried disabling CIM and memory usage dropped to 1666 MB, which still seems high for a bare ESXi server! Is this normal and if not, how can I reduce the memory usage?

[Halesh]

Most of the memory is reserved as you can see in esxtop. The main consumers of the memory from host side are visrofs (ramdisk, tardisk), minFree (reserved), kernel managed data. User process like shell, hostd, vpxd, . Apart from that, networking, storage and other drivers will reserve the memory during load to perform better and hence we see that memory usage on idle host is seen high.