Windows 7 does not add physical memory to pagefile

I have a Dell XPS 9000 desktop with 12GB physical memory. I use this desktop to run 2-3 VirtualBox VMs simultaneously for testing. As time went by, I found that I need to run still more VMs. When I start up the 4th VM, all 12GB memory is exhausted and I get an error that the VM cannot allocate memory.

Memory upgrade was expensive so I thought that I will buy a SSD and create a 12GB pagefile on the SSD. If I run the 4th VM, Windows will use pagefile and I will still get an acceptable performance because pagefile is on SSD.

After adding SSD and shifting entire 12GB pagefile to SSD, I found that Windows 7 (Professional) did not make use of the pagefile at all and starting up the 4th VM still leads to memory exhaustion.

I clearly remember that in XP, Windows used to add the pagefile size to physical memory to report total memory size. Windows 7 stubbornly fails to utilize the pagefile.

Since pagefile was the only content of the SSD, I monitored the SSD activity in resource monitor as I was starting up the VMs. There was 0 activity against the SSD while the VM ran out of memory.

Any ideas on what is going on?

Thanks...
Arun

Thanks, that is what I thought was going on. Now I will not feel guilty about adding memory...