It depends on how responsive you need to console to be. With its default of 272MB it is memory starved and horribly slow.  So we always use 512MB minimum. Otherwise you are almost immediately using the swap.

As for swap file size, I always use 2x the maximum RAM that can be assigned to the console, so 800MB x 2 or 1.6GB swap. that way if you bump up the RAM the swap is the correct size. Of if you scale SC RAM back, you have plenty of swap and you will need it.

my 2 cents

From what I understand - 2048MB is the maximum that will be used anyways.  I make the swap partition accordingly.  I allocate 800MB to the COS - backup agents etc.....

DB

I also use 800 MB for the Service Console for Backup Agents, Dell Open Manage Agents, 16 - 20 VM's, HA agent, Virtual Center Agent

Hello,

The SC swapfile is a partition on the disk. If you have free space after installation, which most people do not, you could create another swap partition and have 2 swap partitions. If you however do not have the space on the drive to make a new partition. You can also use a file for a swap location similar to pagefile.sys if you are a Windows person. However, this is strongly discouraged . If you do have to swap you will end up hammering the filesystem upon which it resides.

Now a bit of trivia. Swap partitions can be any size, however anything over 2GB per swap partition are ignored. YOu can have up to 32 swap partitions/files.

You would use the following

Create a swap partition:

      fdisk /dev/sd?

Make the swap file:

      mkswap /dev/sd?

Edit /etc/fstab

      Copy the swap definition in there already and change the /dev/sd? to be the appropriate device

Run

     swapon -a

That is how you add a secondary swap partition.

To add a file...

First create a 65MB swap file:

      dd if=/dev/zero of=/pathToSwap/swapFileName  bs=1024 count=65536

pathToSwap could be anything but I would put it in /var or even /tmp, depends on where you have separate filesystems. Do NOT use NFS (it does not work) and I would avoid any VMFS as well. Unless absolutely necessary avoid remote storage altogether.

swapFileName can be anything as well.

This one however requires you to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local to add

      swapon /pathToSwap/swapFileName

However, even with this discussion on adding more swap. The recommendation is if you do not have the disk space to reinstall with the proper sized swap partition which is generally 2x memory. However, remember that you may need more than one swap partition for > 1GB of memory.

For more information from the SC issue:

man mkswap

man swapon

Best regards,

Edward

Hello,

Are you talking about ESX or VMware Server?

VMs use there own swap file. The information I gave is for the Service Console only and you can not change the swap file using the VI Client directly it all has to happen from the Service Console. You however can set the Service Console Memory within the VI Client and that would require a reboot of the host.

Best regards,

Edward

If the answers were helpful or correct please use the Correct/Helpful buttons to award points.