NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices

A prerequisite to making this change is the creation of a datastore to store the swap files. Because the
VMware swap file storage requirements are dynamic, NetApp suggests creating either a large thinprovisioned
LUN or a FlexVol volume with the Auto Grow feature enabled. Thin-provisioned LUNs and Auto
Grow FlexVol volumes provide a large management benefit when storing swap files. This design removes
the need to micromanage the swap space or to reduce the utilization rate of the storage. Consider the
alternative of storing VMware swap files on traditional storage arrays. If you undersize the swap space, the
VMs fail to start; conversely, if you oversize the swap space, you have provisioned but unused storage.
Note: VMware has documented that the following options must not reside in the VMX file in order to use a
centralized vswap datastore: sched.swap.dir or sched.swap.derivedName
To configure a central datastore to store the virtual swap files follow these steps (and refer to Figure 50).
1 Open vCenter Server.
2 Select an ESX Server.
3 In the right pane, select the Configuration tab.
4 In the Software box, select Virtual Machine Swapfile Location.
5 In the right pane, select edit.
6 The Virtual Machine Swapfile Location wizard will open
7 Select the datastore which will be the global location
8 Repeat steps 2 through 7 for each ESX Server in the cluster.
9
This process configures the ESX Server and does not affect existing VMs. See the next
table for configuring existing VMs.
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