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Pagefile setting on a Hyper-V host
When you install Windows Server 2008 R2 the default page file setting is ‘Automatically manage paging file size for all drives’. Hyper-V hosts are often loaded with a lot of RAM (96GB is not an exception). Because of the ‘Automatically manage paging file size for all drives’ setting your page file will be huge:
There is no reason for such a huge pagefile nor it has any advantage for the parent partition (paging will take place in the virtual machines).
So you can save some space on your hardrive by setting the page file setting to a fixed size:
In the various Hyper-V deployments that I’ve already done I’ve set the pagefile fixed to 6 GB and it works well! Even monitoring this setting with SCOM does not popup alerts ![]()
There is one thing you need to keep in mind: when configuring the pagefile with a value lower than the physical memory, a full memorydump/crashdump file will be incomplete when the system crashes.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Peter Noorderijk on July 6, 2011 at 14:50, and is filed under Hyper-v, Peter Noorderijk. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |









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about 1 year ago
to change the pagefile on a core of hyper-v server (free) system you need to use the commandline because there is no GUI to do this
use the following line:
wmic computersystem set AutomaticManagedPagefile=False
wmic pagefileset where name=”c:\\pagefile.sys” set InitialSize=4000,MaximumSize=6000
about 1 year ago
How do you change virtual memory settings on a Hyper-V Server or Windows Core server?
about 1 year ago
One little footnote: When configuring the pagefile with a value lower than the physical memory, a full memorydump/crashdump file will be incomplete when the system crashes. Something to keep in mind…
about 1 year ago
Hi Jeff, good point. That’s indeed a point to keep in mind.
about 1 year ago
Peter – was there any particular reason you chose 6GB for the pagefile size? Just trying to understand if it was a “random” choice or if there was some logic behind it. Thanks!
about 1 year ago
Hi Richard. In this situation I’ve configured a Root Reserve of 4 GB and multiple this with 1.5…
1.5 is the “old” x32 rule but works fine for this situations.
So there is not really a specific reason for setting it to 6 GB but just a good field experience.
Regards, Peter
about 1 year ago
Hello,
May I point you in this direction: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mghazai/archive/2011/05/26/what-s-the-story-of-pagefile-size-on-hyper-v-servers.aspx
Cheers,
Marc
about 1 year ago
We had a MS RAPS on our Hyper-V clusters and the setting they recommended was 10GB Fixed due to the fact that a memory dump (except the full offcourse) never exceeds 10GB for any system.
about 1 year ago
Another advice:
-make more pagefiles on different physical disks, Windows wil look for the best disk to write to.
-hold the fixed pagefile on the c:\-drive close to your systemdata (harddisk heads have to move a little less)
-defragment the drive before you put the fixedsize pagefile there!