One caveat with ESX is that before 3.5 you
could not Vmotion with your swap files on local storage. This is now possible
with 3.5.
If you want to isolate your guest OS swap
files with ESX just create a separate LUN/VMFS datastore and for every machine
you create make a second small drive on that dedicated swap LUN and point your
guest OS to utilize that drive as the swap directory.
From: Glenn Dekhayser
[mailto:gdekhayser@voyantinc.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008
3:23 PM
To: Brent Wilkinson; Page, Jeremy;
Hadrian Baron; Toasters
Subject: RE: Mulling over virtual
disk layout
You REALLY
don’t want any kind of swap/temp/paging file on a volume you’re
going to snapshot, since the data changes often and is useless from a recovery
point of view. So you want that on a different volume anyway. If
it’s ESX swap you’re referring to, I agree with Brent, put it on
local disk, that way it has a dedicated 100MB/s (or whatever your local drives
can write/read at) channel- if you’re using swap you’re going to
slow down anyway, so you’ll want to reduce contention for that.
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
[mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On
Behalf Of Brent Wilkinson
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008
4:14 PM
To: Page, Jeremy; Hadrian Baron;
Toasters
Subject: RE: Mulling over virtual
disk layout
If your ESX hosts have local disk, create
VMFS partition and put them there. ( this is actually a suggestion in the 3.5
install guide)
From:
owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Page, Jeremy
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008
10:46 AM
To: Hadrian Baron; Toasters
Subject: RE: Mulling over virtual
disk layout
I’m not
concerned with making them faster, I just don’t see any reason for
snapping a TB or so of swap files offsite.
Jeremy
M. Page____________________
Systems Architect
* email:Jeremy.Page@gilbarco.com - ( phone: 336.547.5399 - 6 fax: 336.547.5163
- ( cell: 336.601.7274
From: Hadrian Baron
[mailto:Hadrian.Baron@vegas.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008
12:44 PM
To: Page, Jeremy; Toasters
Subject: RE: Mulling over virtual
disk layout
“1)
The swap wants reasonably fast disk”
With 500 vms
I’d hope you have a decent amount of spindles to play with (it is
certainly justified), if the swap needs to be really fast why not carve a
dedicated aggregate for them and FC attach them. I don’t see how
putting the swap luns in a different volume on the same aggregate will make the
swap any faster, other than removing ASIS from the equation.
- Hadrian
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
[mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On
Behalf Of Page, Jeremy
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008
5:04 AM
To: Toasters
Subject: Mulling over virtual disk
layout
We are in the
preliminary stages of moving our 500 VM system to NFS (from fibre). The goal is
to SnapVault everything off site, and I’d like to use A-SIS on our
production volumes if at all possible (our VMs are almost identical and 95%
reads so this should give us a great level of compression). My question to you
is this:
Should I put the swap
file on a different VMDK and put that in a different volume? The reasoning
behind this is that 1) The swap wants reasonably fast disk and 2) I think that
the swap file will not “play nicely” with A-SIS, at least not as nicely
as normal data and 3) There is no need to actually waste bandwidth snapping the
swap file offsite since it’s not needed to recover the machines (as long
as in a DR standpoint we create the drive that contained the swap windows will
create it at boot).
Thoughts or
experiences welcome.
Jeremy
M. Page____________________
Systems Architect
* email:Jeremy.Page@gilbarco.com - ( phone: 336.547.5399 - 6 fax: 336.547.5163
- ( cell: 336.601.7274
This
message (including any attachments) contains confidential
and/or proprietary information intended only for the addressee.
Any unauthorized disclosure, copying, distribution or reliance on
the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may
constitute a violation of law. If you are not the intended
recipient, please notify the sender immediately by responding to
this e-mail, and delete the message from your system. If you
have any questions about this e-mail please notify the sender
immediately.
This
message (including any attachments) contains confidential
and/or proprietary information intended only for the addressee.
Any unauthorized disclosure, copying, distribution or reliance on
the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may
constitute a violation of law. If you are not the intended
recipient, please notify the sender immediately by responding to
this e-mail, and delete the message from your system. If you
have any questions about this e-mail please notify the sender
immediately.