6.5.1

Table Of Contents
Host-local swap is now enabled for the standalone host.
Swap Space and Memory Overcommitment
You must reserve swap space for any unreserved virtual machine memory (the dierence between the
reservation and the congured memory size) on per-virtual machine swap les.
This swap reservation is required to ensure that the ESXi host is able to preserve virtual machine memory
under any circumstances. In practice, only a small fraction of the host-level swap space might be used.
If you are overcommiing memory with ESXi, to support the intra-guest swapping induced by ballooning,
ensure that your guest operating systems also have sucient swap space. This guest-level swap space must
be greater than or equal to the dierence between the virtual machine’s congured memory size and its
Reservation.
C If memory is overcommied, and the guest operating system is congured with insucient swap
space, the guest operating system in the virtual machine can fail.
To prevent virtual machine failure, increase the size of the swap space in your virtual machines.
n
Windows guest operating systems— Windows operating systems refer to their swap space as paging
les. Some Windows operating systems try to increase the size of paging les automatically, if there is
sucient free disk space.
See your Microsoft Windows documentation or search the Windows help les for “paging les.” Follow
the instructions for changing the size of the virtual memory paging le.
n
Linux guest operating system — Linux operating systems refer to their swap space as swap les. For
information on increasing swap les, see the following Linux man pages:
n
mkswap — Sets up a Linux swap area.
n
swapon — Enables devices and les for paging and swapping.
Guest operating systems with a lot of memory and small virtual disks (for example, a virtual machine with
8GB RAM and a 2GB virtual disk) are more susceptible to having insucient swap space.
N Do not store swap les on thin-provisioned LUNs. Running a virtual machine with a swap le that is
stored on a thin-provisioned LUN can cause swap le growth failure, which can lead to termination of the
virtual machine.
When you create a large swap le (for example, larger than 100GB), the amount of time it takes for the
virtual machine to power on can increase signicantly. To avoid this, set a high reservation for large virtual
machines.
You can also place swap les on less costly storage using host-local swap les.
Configure Virtual Machine Swapfile Properties for the Host
Congure a swaple location for the host to determine the default location for virtual machine swaples in
the vSphere Web Client.
By default, swaples for a virtual machine are located on a datastore in the folder that contains the other
virtual machine les. However, you can congure your host to place virtual machine swaples on an
alternative datastore.
You can use this option to place virtual machine swaples on lower-cost or higher-performance storage. You
can also override this host-level seing for individual virtual machines.
vSphere Resource Management
38 VMware, Inc.