I inherited a 6 node VMware cluster at the company I am at now. We currently are running 6 PowerEdge R710 servers from Dell. 4 of them have ESX 4.0 and the other 2 have ESXi 4.1. We just took delivery of a Cisco Blade Chassis, so Im configuring the blades and came accross the Virtual Machine Swapfile Location setting. On our current 6 Dell servers, each host has a NFS datastore from our SAN caled "VMSWAP" set for the swapfile location. From what I have read, chosing this option can be benificial for troubleshooting if you are having performance issues on the host or in the guest os, even though I am not quite sure how. My question is, what is the best practice? Should I store the swapfiles with the virtual machines and only change it if I am having an issue? Is there a performance impact on vMotion by having a centralized datastore specified as a swapfile location? Any other "gotcha's" that would come from doing it this way?
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