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glen98
Contributor
Contributor

Help! I need to move guest swap location on standalone ESXi 6.5

Hello, 

I got myself into a jam and desperately need advice from somone who understands this better than I do. I had a server hardware failure and ended up restoring from Veeam backup to another server but didn't have time to think it through. This server was supposed to be temporary until new hardware arrived.

I realize now that there wasn't enough space on this drive and it's down to 13GB of free space. Veeam backups won't work and I can't replicate another smaller 80GB guest off to another server which would free up space to run Veeam backups and replicate. 

I am running ESXi 6.5 on a standalone server with direct attached storage. One SSD and one spin drive and the 80GB guest is on the spin drive. 

After discussing with Veeam, here are my options:

- I can either disable Veeam minimum threshhold to replicate the smaller 80GB guest to another server. It would probably work but it could bring this drive to a halt if I am wrong and bring down the far more important 700GB guest. My guess is the snapshot file would not get that large but I can't be sure. I would be surprised if more than 5GB has changed over the past two days.

- I can change swap location. 

- Maybe I can manually download the guest files and load them to another server and register it. Not sure if this is workable or not.

I think my best bet is to change the swap location for the 80GB guest to the SSD with much more space under:  Edit Settings > VM Options > Configuration Parameters > Edit Configuration > sched.swap.derivedName > drive location/UUID

Can I safely do this if I:

- shutdown the guest

- edit the configuration with new directory location on SSD

- Manually "Move" both vswp files using Datastore browser to a new folder on the SSD: there are 2 vswp files so I assume I need to move both.

- start guest

I understand it's not the vswp files which are the problem but it's the sched.swap.derivedName location which determines where the snapshot is stored when Veeam is doing it's thing. 

Any advice and insight would be greatly appreciated. I need to solve this sooner rather than later.

Thanks

Glenn

 

 

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