Specifications

39 Deploying VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager with NetApp FAS/V-Series Storage Systems
APPENDIX A: VMS WITH NONREPLICATED TRANSIENT DATA
If the transient data in your environment, such as VMware virtual machine swapfiles or Windows system
pagefiles, has been separated onto nonreplicated datastores, then ESX and SRM might be configured to
recover virtual machines while maintaining the separation of that data.
Below is an image describing the environment represented in this document, with the addition that transient
data contained in Windows pagefiles and VMware *.vswp files has been separated into a nonreplicated
datastore.
At both the primary and DR sites nonreplicated volumes have been created to contain ESX datastores for
virtual machine swapfiles and pagefiles. See below for information regarding configuring the systems to use
these datastores for transient data storage.
Figure 15 SRM with Non-Replicated Transient Data
PROTECTING VMS ON ESX HOSTS WITH NONREPLICATED SWAPFILES
When a virtual machine is powered on, a virtual swapfile is created on disk equal to the size of the memory
allocated in the virtual machine. For example, when the virtual machine Win2k3-VM2 is powered on, a file
called Win2k3-VM2-0c657624.vswp is created in the configured location.
By default this vswp file is stored in the same location as the virtual machine, causing this data to be
replicated, along with the configuration files for the virtual machine and its virtual disk file. The location of the
vswp file can be changed with the following procedures.
CONFIGURING THE VSWAP FILE LOCATION IN ESX 3.5 AND 4.0
In ESX 3.5 configure the ESX cluster settings to use the location specified by the ESX hosts to store
swapfiles. Then, on each ESX host specify the name of a nonreplicated datastore for swapfiles.