Swap Partition

[pizzoja]

Hi,  I have already installed ESX 3.01 on multiple server and would like to  know if here is anyway to resize the swap partion without having to completely reinstall?

Thanks,


Joel

[VMT1]

Joel,

The SC swapfile is a partition on the disk. If you have free space after installation, which most people do not, you could create another swap partition and have 2 swap partitions. If you however do not have the space on the drive to make a new partition, you can also use a file for a swap location similar to pagefile.sys if you are a Windows person. However, this is strongly discouraged . If you do have to swap you will end up hammering the filesystem upon which it resides.

Now a bit of trivia. Swap partitions can be any size, however anything over 2GB per swap partition are ignored. You can have up to 32 swap partitions/files.

To create a second Swap Partition, you would use the following:

Create a swap partition:
fdisk /dev/sd?

Make the swap file:
mkswap /dev/sd?

Edit /etc/fstab
Copy the swap definition in there already and change the /dev/sd? to be the appropriate device

Run
swapon -a

That is how you add a secondary swap partition.

To add a swap file only ...

First create a 65MB swap file:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/pathToSwap/swapFileName bs=1024 count=65536

pathToSwap could be anything but I would put it in /var or even /tmp, depends on where you have separate filesystems. Do NOT use NFS (it does not work) and I would avoid any VMFS as well. Unless absolutely necessary avoid remote storage altogether.

swapFileName can be anything as well.

This one however requires you to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local to add
swapon /pathToSwap/swapFileName

The recommendation is that you do not have the disk space to create a second swap partition, then reinstall with the proper sized swap partition which is generally 2x memory needed for the Service Console.
For more information from the SC issue:
man mkswap
man swapon

[dougbunger]

As a small point of clarification, I tested this on one of VM Training's development servers, and a swapfile will not run on a VMFS share.  So Jeff's statement of "avoid VMFS" should be "don't use VMFS".