Is it Good to place Windows Server paging files on seperate fast storage?

Question

How much of an impact does the performance of the storage system hosting the paging files of windows machines (I guess both physical or virtual instances like VMWare / KVM / Xen / Whatever)?

Answer 1

I can only speak for VMWare products (and you don't mention a particular product of theirs - perhaps you can). But certainly with ESX/ESXi 4.1 I'd be strongly tempted to allocate more virtual memory to your VMs than you would do and care less about the swapfile - simply because 4.1 is so good at managing physical memory (with shared and compressed pages for instance) that you may actually reduce the need to swap by quite a margin, meaning actual swap speed becomes less important. I know Hyper-V has very recently moved a little way towards in this area but I can't speak for Xen sorry.

As for the actual question; think of it in physical terms, do you put your swapfile on a separate high performance drive now? if you do then perhaps you need to look into your application and/or memory setup - but certainly a faster swap drive will obviously help in scenarios where you're swapping a lot - and nothing about that changes in a virtualised world.

Hope this helps.