NetApp and vSwap questions...

[theblackknight]

Should I create a separate datastore per ESX host for the vSwap file? Is this advantageous to our design with SnapMirror. If we do this, are there ramifications when using SRM?

[bsti · Accepted solution]

It's definitely a good idea to setup a separate data store in a separate Netapp Volume for the vSwap files. This is because you don't want or need to SnapMirror that data to your SM Destination. It's temporary data anyway and would not be used on the other end. And since you can only define SM Sources at the volume level, you must make them separate volumes.

If you haven't already, take a look over NetApp's VMWare best practices document:

It outlines this among many other best practices.

I'm not an SRM expert, so perhaps someone who is a little more familar can comment on that.

[vmwarestoragegu]

As long as the ESX servers are configured the same way there is no ramification to SRM with this architecture.

[nnnnnnj]

I put the vSwap and Windows Page Files on a separate NetApp volume so as not to mirror em. But, SMVI then "links" the separate volume (due to VMs having vmdk's on both) and mirrors it anyway. The way around that is to set the VM's virtual disk that hosts the page file to be independent-persistent.

But that in turn makes the SRM setup so much more complicated as you have to create new page disks on the destination for each VM and connect the placeholder VMs to the new page disks as per the NetApp best practice.

It's actually much easier just to mirror the volume with the vSwap and the page files but to do it on a weekly schedule using snapmirror.conf rather than syncing up with the SMVI schedule.

Tony