Good Morning,
we have six ESXi 6.0 hosts (Enterpris Plus) running and (during normal operations) we have enough RAM in these machines service the configured ram of all VMs without ballooing or paging on the ESXi level.
There are several artices regarding page file size out in the internet e.g.
Page File – The definitive guide – Windows Security
Most of them seem to be for physical machines and dont's say much about servers in virtual environments.
As I have seen that some of my VMs are using the page file (and do disk I/O down to the SAN) although they have still virtual memory free I wonder whether I should switch off/reduce the size of the page file of the VM and leave the memory handling to the ESXi hosts (plenty of physical memory, if necessary memory ballooning and ESXi pagefile). Depending on the VM I could also increase the virtual memory of the VM to some amount.
Are there any best practices or recommendations for this? Anything official from VMWare and/or Microsoft? Are there any differences regarding Windows Server 2008R2 / Windows Server 2012 R2 / Windows Server 2016 (and Linux)?