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ncarde
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What's the risk of increasing SC Memory but not the Swap Partition?

If we are at 512 MB for Service Console (and a 1GB Swap Partition) what is the risk of increasing SC to 800 MB and leaving the Swap Partition at 1GB?

If all 800MB of memory an >1GB of Swap Partition space is actively needed then we have bigger issues, no??

Thank you!

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BenConrad
Expert
Expert

Correct, If you are using > 1GB of swap something is really wrong. Let's say you double that swap to 2GB, whatever ate the 1GB of swap will eventually grow to eat up the 2GB. I recently went through and resized swap on a bunch of our servers, it was a PITA but it was faster than blowing away the server and kicking off a KickStart install.

800MB of memory will give you enough room to run monitoring agents, vRanger backups, supports large clusters, prolongs leaky apps from hitting swap.. Smiley Happy

Ben

Jasemccarty
Immortal
Immortal

We use big boxes, with anywhere from 4 quads to 8 single core processors, and have the maximum of 800MB assigned to the Service Console.

We run anywhere from 50 to 100 guests on a host, at any given time.

Back in the ESX 2.x days, we set the SC memory to 800MB if we were going to run 32 guests or more. We do that now with ESX 3.5.

The rule of thumb that I have always heard, and practiced, was 2x the amount of SC memory you are using.

With that, our swap partition is 1.6GB on every host.

Cheers,

Jase

Jase McCarty, VCP, vExpert, VTSP

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

Please consider awarding points if this post was helpful or correct

Jase McCarty - @jasemccarty
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ncarde
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks, Guys -- I should have worded my question differently (there is plenty of advice out there for making sure that you 2x the amount of SC RAM for your Swap Partition size).

My question was more of "will something break" if I increase SC RAM to 800 MB but don't bother to upsize the 1GB existing swapfile (either via a swap file method, second swap partition, or rebuilding the ESX host). I don't want to have to bother with the swap partition at this point in other words.

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