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Administration best practices
20 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Windows Server Best Practices | 680-042-007
3.9 Placement of page files
Windows Servers and VMs typically place the page file on the boot volume by default, and automatically
manage page file size and memory settings without user intervention. In most cases, these settings should
not be changed, unless, for example, an application vendor provides specific guidance on how to tune the
page file and memory settings to optimize the performance of a specific workload. Ultimately, each customer
will need to decide on the best strategy as they consider variables that are unique to their environment.
Default Windows Server page file settings
With SC Series storage, there can be some advantages to placing a page file on a separate volume from the
perspective of the storage array if leveraging boot-from-SAN. The following reasons may not be sufficiently
advantageous by themselves to justify changing the defaults, but in cases where a vendor recommends
making changes to optimize a workload, consider the following tips as part of the overall page-file strategy.
• Moving the page file to a separate dedicated SAN volume reduces the amount of data that is
changing on the system (boot) volume. This can help reduce the size of SC Series snapshots of boot
volumes which will conserve space in the disk pool.
• Volumes dedicated to page files typically do not require snapshot protection, and therefore do not
need to be replicated to a remote site as part of a DR plan. This is especially beneficial in cases
where there is limited bandwidth for replication of volumes and snapshots to another SC Series array.
3.10 SC Series snapshots with Windows Server
SC Series snapshots can be used to protect and replicate Server boot-from-SAN or data volumes and
associated workloads. Snapshots are space-efficient, meaning they consist only of pointers to frozen blocks