Disable Windows Pagefile Still A Good Best Practice?

[gamename]

Hi,

Quoting from here:

• Disabling a page file inside the guest will improve the performance, provided you make the VM to run with good amount of memory. Above this ESX host will create a default grow able swap in VM folder for flipping the memory balloon. (Not recommended when VM running with I/O intensive applications (Exchange, SQL etc)).

Is this still considered a good idea for Windows guests?   If not, what is a more effective way to deal with paging on Windows?

Thanks,

-T

[weinstein5]

To be honest with you I have never heard of that as a best practicefrom VMware - in fact by disabling the pagefile eliminates the benefits you will gain from the Ballon Driver that is part of vmware tools - my understanding is that it is not best practice and it is not how I have deployed many Windows machines with pagefiles intact -

Like the physical world to reduce pagefile usage give the VM more memory.

[Josh26]

Never was a best practice according to VMware, and was always a terrible practice according to Microsoft.

I wouldn't pay much attention to this "best practice" guide.

[rickardnobel]

gamename wrote:

Disabling a page file inside the guest will improve the performance, provided you make the VM to run with good amount of memory. Above this ESX host will create a default grow able swap in VM folder for flipping the memory balloon.

The vmkernel *.vswp file will not be accessable from inside the VM and by that can not be alterned in any way by the guest memory manager, and by that can not do anything IF ballooning would occur. If the balloon would grow and the VM is short on memory it would have to kill processes to make room for the balloon driver memory areas.

gamename wrote:

If not, what is a more effective way to deal with paging on Windows?

In my opinion there are many misunderstandings on how much Windows really pages into the pagefile. Do you know if you actually have a problem with Windows paging on any of your machines?

[jdptechnc · Accepted solution]

I don't know who published that "best practice", but they are factually incorrect for the reasons stated above.  I can't think of a valid reason to disable the page file in a Windows server at all.  If your VM is heavily writing to the page file, you either need to add memory, or there is an application that is poorly written, and disabling the page file isn't going to prevent those issues.  Apps like SQL Server look for page file space to claim (even though it isn't active paging), to use in case it is needed.