Swap Partition

Though installing the Operating System in a Virtual Machine may be the same as in real machines, carefully planning the swap partition of the virtual machines will save a lot of disk space. Follow those guidelines.

Swap Volume

Mark at the creation of the Virtual Machine that swap disk volume. The desired max size must be declared there. That way a different disk will be created with that purpose. This volume is different than regular data disk volumes: it will be created only at the start of the machine and it will be destroyed at shutdown. Also, this volume won’t keep incremental changes from the base, as data volumes do.

Partitioning

Later on we will address particular considerations for swap space in different operating systems. By now, keep in mind that the best practice is to keep a disk volume only for swap.

Linux

It is reccommended keep the swapping the less possible. If possible remove the swap partitions and the swap configuration in /etc/fstab.

Some software on Linux requires some swap to run. If so, set the swappiness to the minimun this way:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=1

To make this change permanent add it to the file: /etc/sysctl.conf