Locate vSwap/Pagefile on a second Datastore

[firestartah]

Hi

I'm currently doing a design that implements SRM and the storage vendor the client is planning to use recommends separating the vSwap and the pagefiles onto secondary datastores and i was wondering what is people experiences of this as I've done the vSwap separation before but never pagefile.

Thanks

Gregg

[firestartah]

:smileygrin: No one keen to answer my question?

[mal_michael]

Hi,

Some points I can think of:

1. Single point of failure - if that datastore gets corrupted / unmapped, this will affect multiple VMs

2. vSwap datastore is quite easy to configure. But if you environment is not overcommited, this won't save replication traffic, since no host swapping will occur and vswap files won't change.

3. Separating paging file adds management complexity, since additional steps will be required while:

     - creating new VMs

     - protecting VMs

     - reconfiguring existing VMs

4. You can have maximum of 64 hosts accessing single VMFS volume

Are you planning to have that datastore(s) replicated?

Michael.

[firestartah]

Hi

Thanks for the response. Most of your points were mine as my plan is to obviously have no swapping happening so i agree the vSwap shouldn't be changing much if at all. The paging file is an added administration and management overhead for all the points you mention and the additional configurations in SRM to remove these locations from being replicated.

Thanks

Gregg

[harrygunter]

One thing to add regarding the vswap is that if you power off the guests it will be creared and then re-created, if you don't seperate the vsawp location then it will be replicated. Same with new provisioned Guests.

I looked into seperating the pagefiles also but decided that it was not worth the extra complexity.

You can also set the pagefiles low on the Guests and make sure they have enough memory not to page, dependant on your applications.