The PDF I blogged about yesterday included info about 3.0.x and 3.5 features. One of the things that was missing was the option to have the swapfiles created locally. In 3.0.x this done by setting the option “sched.swap.dir” in the .vmx file. The only problem is that this prohibits you from using VMotion for these VM’s. In 3.5 VMware resolved this issue. It’s now possible to set the swap file location to local storage and keep VMotion at the same time. This can be done very easily the following way:
- Edit setting on cluster, click “Swapfile location” and select “Store the swapfile in the datastore specified by the host”
- Click on the ESX Host, click on the “Configuration” tab, click on “Virtual Machine Swapfile Location” and “edit”
Select “Store the swapfile in a swapfile datastore selected below”
Select the local attached storage: [hostname:storage1]