1
VOTE
Status
Future consideration
Workspace
* IBM Cloud Ideas
Categories
Virtual Servers
Created by
Guest
Created on
Apr 3, 2024
RELATED IDEAS
Provide larger swap disks with VM instances
Currently IBM provides a "swap" disk (labelled as such in both the portal and Windows) of only 2GB, regardless of VM instance size.
This is too small to actually function as a swap disk for the vast majority of VMs. Indeed Windows will ignore this disk for swap purposes entirely and use the OS disk exclusively for pagefile operations.
The default IBM OS disk size though is 100GB, which (for some available RAM configurations) wouldn't be of sufficient size even if the entire disk was used.
Microsoft provides similar "temporary storage" disks on most of the VMs, where the size is at least twice that of the configured RAM for the VM.
If IBM did the same, swap would become effective on rented VMs.
| Idea priority | Low |
| Needed By | Not sure -- Just thought it was cool |
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hello Chris thanks for reaching out! I posted the questions in the internal comments, perhaps you do not have access to it.
Which customers are questing these enhancement? Do you have any opportunities associated?
I'd love to provide more information (as the status requests), but I thought I was pretty comprehensive with the original request, and I don't see any questions or comments to respond to.
Azure has usefully-sized swap disks - IBM doesn't. 🤷♀️
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/performance/how-to-determine-the-appropriate-page-file-size-for-64-bit-versions-of-windows#determine-the-appropriate-page-file-size
Microsoft recommends "3 × RAM or 4 GB, whichever is larger". So for example, our VM with 32GB RAM should have ~96GB of swap drive available, instead of the current 2GB. (And again, note that the default 100GB OS drive would barely suffice even if it were completely empty, which it isn't).