Impact of VM swap file placement

The creation of a virtual machine's swap file is automatic. By default, this file is created in the virtual machine's working directory, but a different location can be set.

Swap file contains swapped memory pages and its size is determined as allocated RAM size—reservation. If performance is important in the design, 100 percent memory reservations should be created, causing no need to swap to disk.

You can optionally configure a special host cache on an SSD (if one is installed) to be used for the swap to host cache feature. This swap cache is shared by all the virtual machines running on the host. In addition, host level swapping of the virtual machines' most active pages benefit from the low latency of SSD. The swap to host cache feature makes the best use of potentially limited SSD space. This feature is also optimized for the large block sizes at which some SSDs work best.

If a host does not use the swap to host cache feature, place the virtual machine...