gues vswap

[jeddgo123]

Hi all

i just wanted to get thoughts and ideas on location of guest vswap files. Have read different and of course conflicting theories on where the guest swap should be placed. whether with VM home directory or on a separate folder. and then NFS vs LUN's

Let me know what are best practices and what you guys have done, what you wouldn't do again?

THanks for the help.

[m_lubinski]

this guide from vSphere should clear it out:

http://vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware_NFS_BestPractices_WP_EN.pdf

especially

Some early adopters of VI3 on NFS created some best practices that are no longer viewed favorably. They are:
1. Turn off the NFS locking within the ESX server
2. Not placing virtual machine swap space on NFS storage.
Both these have been debunked and the following section provides more details as to why these are not no longer considered best practices.

[rmharwood]

Personally I would recommend storing virtual disks for swapfiles in a separate datastore from the other VM files. We primarily do this (over NFS) so we never end up backing up this kind of "transient" data. If you do this you should consider marking those virtual disks as "independent" and "persistent" so that VM snapshots do not get taken of those virtual disks.

Richard

[jeddgo123]

Hi all

THanks for the answers. the guide is helpful. THanks for the link. I just need to figure out now how to deploy the VM's over several datastores, e.g. OS datastore, APP datastore, VSWAP datastore, etc......

If I do that, i dread on the management side of things on how and what level of complexity i'm introducing into our environment.