ESX Swap file/VM Page file location question
ESXi 5 Cluster
NetApp FAS3240 Cluster (Active/Active)
NFS Datastores
I'm going through the best practices documentation from NetApp concerning vSphere and Storage (TR-3749).
NetApp recommends storing the VM Swapfile on a centralized datastore for disk cost savings (snapshots and replication). This setting would be set at the host level. When going into the settings at the cluster level, VMware "recommends" saving this within the same directory as the VM.
Anyone have experience with this? As in pros and cons? I can see where this could degrade the performance of vMotion, but other than this I was looking for some input from people who have run this in production.
Also, what are your thoughts on also moving the VM's pagefile (OS) to a separate VMDK that is located on a centralized datastore as well? Same thought process here.. disk savings is nice, but don't want to introduce stability issues (if any).
NetApp FAS3240 Cluster (Active/Active)
NFS Datastores
I'm going through the best practices documentation from NetApp concerning vSphere and Storage (TR-3749).
NetApp recommends storing the VM Swapfile on a centralized datastore for disk cost savings (snapshots and replication). This setting would be set at the host level. When going into the settings at the cluster level, VMware "recommends" saving this within the same directory as the VM.
Anyone have experience with this? As in pros and cons? I can see where this could degrade the performance of vMotion, but other than this I was looking for some input from people who have run this in production.
Also, what are your thoughts on also moving the VM's pagefile (OS) to a separate VMDK that is located on a centralized datastore as well? Same thought process here.. disk savings is nice, but don't want to introduce stability issues (if any).
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Yes, Increased Performance, for very little space used.
Overcoming slower latency in using traditional disk, where SSD have much better performance in this area.
SSD is just for Host Cache. So 32GB will be ample for most sites.
Overcoming slower latency in using traditional disk, where SSD have much better performance in this area.
SSD is just for Host Cache. So 32GB will be ample for most sites.
ASKER
one more question, would there be an issue with creating one datastore for both the swapfile and pagefile on all my VMs?
Certainly not, but make sure you do not have performance issues with it, otherwise ALL VMs will be affected.
ASKER
certainly not? As in yes? or no?
=)
=)
No issues, but monitor performance of the disk and datastore.
ASKER
But you bring up an interesting point about using SSDs. In general can we gain performance by using them for host cache?