you could also argue that, because you don’t have any spinning parts in your ESX host you save on money. Also your system is less redundant. You probably use 2 disks for the system to keep them in a RAID set, you still only got one controller. If that one fails you have nothing.

You probably have redundant paths to the SAN, which makes it more redundant than local disks IMHO.

If you only have one connection to your SAN with one path, one switch, yeah, then I do agree with TAZZ, you could improve some things in the VI infrastructure to make it (more) fault tolerant.

No, I do not confuse ESX swap and VM swap, and yes I can find the HA logs ;-).
I fully agree with you that the real-world I/O impact of having userworld swap on SAN should not be an issue. Nevertheless VMware recommends all partitions for ESX to be stored with the operating system, my guess is that this should apply to ESXi also.

Imagine this senario.
Let us say that you have a number of ESXi hosts with a LUN set aside for having the userworld swap. Then you experience a SAN hiccup and loose connection to your LUNS. That would not trigger a HA response from the host, because we still have network connectivity on the host. But it would, of cause, mean that the guests go down. but since the HA agent does not work without userworld swap, and that was on the SAN that we cant get hold of, the aam agent would crash/hang, not getting the machines up again.

http://www.vmguru.nl

I’m curious why in the &*!^ would you add local disks for ESX swap placement. I agree with you that this is not a very elegant solution but why don’t you place ESX swap on your SAN. Because of increased I/O? Which I/O? ESX Swap is almost never used and max 5GB per ESX host so there is very little I/O.

There’s a difference between ESX swap and virtual machine swap space. Indeed virtual machine swap space can be very I/O intensive so this may be placed on local disk instead or SAN (different location from VM). So I think you mixed up ESX swap and VM swap.

So maybe you will be a ESXi fan after all

i also wanted to go to munchen but i had to much work on my current job. and i wanted to make sure that i know enough to pass.

do you have any tips of material to read of things you have to know ?

how do we have to see the blueprint as something excactly to know

how does the exam look like ? all multiple choice with strange questions ?

lets us know.

regards bjorn bats
http://www.bjornbats.nl

Please do so and if you have something to add - feel free to make a comment on it.
Heino

I’ll be checking out your study materials post.