So, I spent serveral days last week playing around with the pros and cons of running a Linux (CentOS) vs a Windows (Server 2003) host.
One thing that was frustrating me was that I couldn't find a way to get rid of the disk i/o by disabling the vmem files. As many of your know you can disable this in your config, but in Linux it moves a file that appears of similar functionality to your /tmp directory and on Windows, at least from what I read, it moves into the pagefile.
This is where it get's interesting, if I disable the page file on the Windows server, I never see a change in my used disk space. So, it would appear that disabling the pagefile on a Windows server host gets past the disk i/o (not to mentions disk space!) used by vmware for memory. And, no it does not appear to use any more memory either!
So, as someone who until this point has always tried to run Linux for my VM Serer host, I'm wondering if anyone knows if this can be acheived on Linux? Getting memory off the disk is way too much of a performance gain for me to ignore.
Thanks for exploring this topic with me.
Daniel