ESX3.0.2 Is this true for remote NFS Vm's and vm Swap that will be on my local drive on the ESX server?
I am migrating W2K VM's that were stored locally on a server running vmware server, to a NFS datastore that will be seen by ESX3.0.2.
But the VM swap file will be on the ESX server and not the NFS share, as instructed in one of the vmware docs, to aid performance.
In the near future we want to go to HA/DRS/vmotion and the text below leads me to believe we will not be able to do this.
How can I specify an alternate location for VM snapshot files?
To specify a new directory or datastore for snapshot files follow the below procedure. When you specify a new working directory for a VM the vswp file that is created when the VM is powered on is also stored in that location. If your VM is on shared storage and you specify local storage as a location you will not be able to use Vmotion/HA/DRS.
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Vmotion and DRS would fail because the destination host would not have access to the swap file. HA, which would be restarting the VM from scratch and thus be recreating the swap file, would also fail because it would not have access to the data store as well and you could only have one datastore in Virtualcenter called "/vmfs/volumes/SnapVolume/"
answer: NO
Also in ESX3i you won't have a local drive
I have read that this issue with storing swap on local storage while the guest is on NFS and inability to VMotion was resolved in ESX 3.5 at least regarding Celerra
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/02/05/swap-files-in-35-and-the-emc-celerra-pdf/