Hi,
Initially, when the VM is started, it consumes only 200 MB, because the QEMU process
allocates memory from the OS only when accessed by the VM. Once the VM uses 26 GB,
QEMU process will also use at least 26 GB.
The ballooning starts shrinking the VM, only if the free memory on the host is below
a threshold, by default 20%. And it will grow the VM back if the free memory is above
the threshold. So once it stabilizes, the host will be using around 80% of memory.
If the host has 30 GB of memory, 80% is 24 GB, so the ballooning seems to be working correctly.
Regards,
Andrej