I'm building a new View 5 environment consisting of a Compellent SAN (no SSD) and HP blades (600GB drives). We'll be using View Composer and linked clones, and DRS configured for automatic. I've been reading the VMware View Administration guide, and it states on pg67 that you can configure the parent virtual machine and linked-clone desktops to store virtual-machine swap files on the local datastore.
I also read the following comments from here (pg 27) http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.0.pdf
- Placing swap files on local storage (whether SSD or hard drive) could potentially reduce vMotion performance. This is because if a virtual machine has memory pages in a local swap file, they must be swapped in to memory before a vMotion operation on that virtual machine can proceed.
- Regardless of the storage type or location used for the regular swap file, for the best performance, and to avoid the possibility of running out of space, swap files should not be placed on thin-provisioned storage.
With this in mind, is there a prefererence either way? In our environment, we don't anticipate any resource contention, as we've scaled our environment appropriately. With that in mind, what is the recommendation?
1) Configure the parent VM/linked clones to use local storage (15k SAS drives) for the swap file?
2) Configure the parent VM/linked clones to use a dedicated LUN (not thin-provisioned) for the swap file?
3) Leave at the default setting - store the VM swap file with the VMDK on the SAN LUN (thin-provisioned)?
If there isn't any memory contention, would vmotion performance still be reduced?
Thanks.
