W2K8 VM using all free memory but not doing anything.

Hi All
Not updated in a while mainly due to the fact my company has had me doing help desk work to cover sickness. Will never understand why they just don't just get another consultant but that's another story for another time.

My first real work for a while has led me to a massive infrastructure of 45 hosts and 600 VMs, not the biggest environment but not the smallest either, I was onsite doing a check for some upgrade work and a minor health check. One of the internal guys was looking over a VM that was using all the allocated memory but wasn't doing much. I had a look and it was a Windows Server 2008 machine on a 64Bit installation acting as a file server. Now I remember reading an article about this and racked my brains for a few mins before I remembered that I made a note of it.....

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976618

This is the problem. Windows Server 2008 uses all the free memory to cache files that it thinks are going to be accessed. This saves time and speeds up the file server role. But as my customer found out, it was causing apps that run on the file server to run slow and unresponsive. The above fix was applied to alter the memory behavior, after the reboot I monitored the VM for the rest of the week. Memory was higher then I would expect but there was plenty free for the apps to run. Would appear the above article works.

My customer however did hesitate in applying the fix as it does detail that it is resolved in Windows 7 and Windows sever 2008 R2, but it would appear it has not been addressed in the 64Bit versions of the operating systems.