[clue] Linux VM image - Should you include a swap partition?

Rossi Guiliani rossi at guiliani.me
Sun Nov 4 18:00:19 MST 2012


 

Hello all, 

This is my first time mailing to this mailing list. I
just have a question I haven't really found any solid answer for with
Google. 

What is the best practice for managing swap within VM images?
Regardless of distro, should I be including a swap partition inside the
main VM image? I've been giving my VMs around 768M-2G of memory (on a
test vmhost). With a base install (pretty much any distro) between 4-6G,
all my partitions add up to only about 1.2G. Is this overhead from a
swap partition? And if so, does it shrink down considerably with image
compression? I just want to find the most efficient management. I
usually set the kernel to use the least swap it can, and I find that
used swap (from free -m) is 0. These are all testing images, and as such
do not see very high load. If they get pushed to production (which is a
possibility depending on testing), should I leave the swap partition
intact within the vm images? 

Thanks in advance for any replies!
R. G. 
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