Swap Partition - Best Practice

[RonenTan]

Hello all,

What is considered as a best practice for creating the swap partition?

Since ESX 4 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.1,

I have searched their knowledge base and found the following article:

Q. If I add several hundred GB of RAM to a system do I really need several

hundred GB of swap space ? (kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-15252)

A. Brief answer:

• Systems with 4GB of ram or less require a minimum of 2GB of swap space

• Systems with 4GB to 16GB of ram require a minimum of 4GB of swap space

• Systems with 16GB to 64GB of ram require a minimum of 8GB of swap space

• Systems with 64GB to 256GB of ram require a minimum of 16GB of swap space

Thanks in advance,

Ronen.

[krishnaprasad]

i believe ESX 4.0 is RHEL 5.3 based.

By default if you see ESX 4.0 partitioning, swap partition is 1GB. for linux, swap space = double the size of RAM. if RAM size is >= 4GB swap can be 4GB itself.

I think the same is applicable for ESX 4.0 . but its better to check in the VMware docs.

[depping · Accepted solution]

1.6GB as the Service Console is limited to 800MB of memory.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

-

---

Blogging:

Twitter:

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[RonenTan]

How can I find the current Service Console memory usage?

[krishnaprasad]

/proc/meminfo will give you the COS memory usage info

[RonenTan]

Which one is the service console?

cat /proc/meminfo

MemTotal: 500264 kB

MemFree: 80824 kB

Buffers: 105516 kB

Cached: 236284 kB

SwapCached: 0 kB

Active: 206700 kB

Inactive: 181564 kB

HighTotal: 0 kB

HighFree: 0 kB

LowTotal: 500264 kB

LowFree: 80824 kB

SwapTotal: 2048248 kB

SwapFree: 2048248 kB

Dirty: 372 kB

Writeback: 0 kB

AnonPages: 46492 kB

Mapped: 43176 kB

Slab: 23936 kB

PageTables: 2232 kB

NFS_Unstable: 0 kB

Bounce: 0 kB

CommitLimit: 2298380 kB

Committed_AS: 306784 kB

VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB

VmallocUsed: 25700 kB

VmallocChunk: 34359704455 kB

HugePages_Total: 0

HugePages_Free: 0

HugePages_Rsvd: 0

Hugepagesize: 2048 kB

MachineMem: 16776447 kB

[krishnaprasad]

its Memtotal - Memfree.

you can see the total physical memory from MachineMem field

[RonenTan]

Thank you two