Separate Disk For Paging File / Swap File / Virtual Memory – Persistent or Nonpersistent?

[mfcmfc]

I want to move my Windows XP paging file into a separate virtual disk to make the VM smaller and easier to back up.

Should I choose a Persistent Independent Disk or a Nonpersistent Independent Disk?

[continuum · Accepted solution]

1. add disk - set to persistant

2. boot VM - format new disk and set pagefile

3. boot VM again - now Windows starts to use the pagefile - do nothing and shut down again

4. now edit vmdk properties and set pagefile.vmdk to nonpesistant

5. done

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now you have a very small vmdk used for the pagefile - it will expand as needed but as soon as you exit the VM it will be reset to fresh and small state

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VMX-parameters- VMware-liveCD - VM-Sickbay

[mfcmfc]

Thank you. That seems like a good strategy.

[mfcmfc]

If anyone knows the Allocation Unit Size that is optimal for the virtual drive dedicated to a paging file I would be curious to know what that is. I did some searching and 4 KB (the default) and 64 KB were the most common answers, but I didn't read anything definitive. My take on the search results is that if there was a benefit to using a non-default allocation unit size I would have found more search results.

[continuum]

leave it as it is I would say - if you assign enough RAM to your guest the pagefile disk will hardly be used at all - so there really is no need to do any special tricks.

Going with defaults also makes sure that you can use standard defragmentation tools against the disk - something which may fail with non-standard blocksizes

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VMX-parameters- VMware-liveCD - VM-Sickbay

[kb3kj]

I decide to give this a try and it worked as expected to give me a small swap disk.

However, when I tried to take further advantage of having deleted the paging file from my old disk I found that VMware tools will no longer let me shrink my old disk. The shrink tab contains the message "Shrink disk is disabled for this virtual machine ..." Is this the way it's supposed to work? I understand why it wouldn't make sense to shrink the nonpersistent disk but does having it effect the ability to shrink the other disk?

I am using VMware Workstation 6.0.2 with a SUSE 10.3 Host and Windows XP guest.

Thanks

[continuum]

you must shrink manually now - the GUI is not smart to enough to handle this :_|

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VMX-parameters- VMware-liveCD - VM-Sickbay