No, that’s not what smart paging is for. Its intent was to ensure that a host that worked before a reboot continues to function after the reboot. It is not for memory oversubscription. It will never balloon for a VM starting up from a cold boot. Hyper-V does not allow memory oversubscription. The startup value will need to be a few gigabytes below host memory to have any chance of starting.

It is still true. WS2016 supports hot remove of memory but almost none of the other guest operating systems do, so the DM driver must still function as it always has.
Article typo fixed, thanks!

May you can give a statement, if this is still true regarding Windows Server 2016? What I know is, that hot remove now is available with WS2016.

PS: I little mistake at the end of the Hyper-V Dynamic Memory section:
Wrong: “The guest still sees a 1.5 MB maximum”
Wrong: “The guest still sees a 1.5 GB maximum”

Well, I’m, a Hyper-V guy, so that’s what I know and use. In Windows or standalone.

I am a computer and communication engineer, in an IT position. Have heavy technical background and find it tiresome to follow Microsoft’s baby making emanations.
I feel awkward to share my experiences here, but i was playing around with VMs since Connectix v1 was around, loved the idea, but now have to learn this stuff as a corporate sense to keep a job, so i chose hyper-v. I also found there are many virtualization OSes out there and after going through this much pain to learn Hyper-V on “actual” server hardware and every little nook and cranny, I am a bit reluctant to start another adventure with another type of virtualization, especially since my tinkering days are over now due to being crazy busy, must take things seriously.

So, I was wondering, would you drop a line about what other types you think are out there, other than VMWare of course? or do you suggest hyper-v even in its core bare-metal package as a virtualization platform (you know for those places where cost is favored over license models)?

I think this is what you’re looking for: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3095308

I must admit, that I am of that sort who tried it and after some time it failed horribly on me and I don’t use it anymore.

Here is why:

We had several times on different hosts the issue that Dynamic Memory did NOT increase the VMs memory, although the host had plenty left, like 20GB or even more. This ended up with an RDP host which we allocated with 4GB start and also minimum RAM and 16GB maximum RAM. Once reaching like 20 sessions we got calls from our customers that they get strange app hangs. Once checked we figured that the VM was starving of RAM as it was still at 4GB. I guess it’s obvious that this is an absolute no go.
The same VM sometimes correctly increased it’s RAM and after a reboot it ocasionally didn’t.

Have you come accross this?

Cheers
Juri