Have a LUN which our VM team is using as their general swap location (ESXi 5.5) for both host local swap files as well as VM files. We keep needing to add space to the volume (currently up to 8TiB allocated) even though on the storage side we're only seeing about 100GiB of space consumed (the VM team gets space warnings on their side).
Browsing the datastore shows many large sysSwap-hls*.swp files in addition to the VMX and VM vswp files. Apparently these are all sparse?
I also notice that the sysSwap files are (at least some of them) quite old (months). Maybe they could be cleaned up? Does anyone know what these are actually used for?
Also curious about general best practices here on the storage side... since we're thin provisioning this volume and only a few hundred GB's are actually being consumed, it isn't a huge concern to keep allocating more space, but feels like we could be managing this a bit better.