How to increase Swap Size on Citrix VM or any Virtual Envirnoment

Swap Space is partition made on Linux systems which act as Virtual Memory. It uses the Hard disk space to enhance the memory management. There are many applications available in market which requires high swap space to work but due to physical hardware sometime its not possible but this is not the case with Virtualization. The biggest advantage of Virtualization is you can get on-demand resources. In this post I am going to explain how you can increase the SWAP Space size on Cirtix VM (Virtual Machine) or Virtualization platform (like vmware).

To add or increase the swap size first you have to add a new virtual disk to the VM. Please check “ADD ADDITIONAL DISK SPACE” section of Extend partition size in Linux LVM (Citrix Xen) without downtime. You should add the disk of exact Swap size you required, let say you need 5Gb of Swap and existing swap size is 2 GB so you need to add disk of 5GB instead of 3 GB.

Configuring Swap

1) Check your Current Swap Size: Use command free -m to see the Memory Utilization including Swap.

2) Now execute “fdisk” command to check if the new disk detected by the VM or not

3) Now initialize the PhysicalVolume using command “pvcreate”

4) Create a new Volume Group named “Swap” with “vgcreate“

5) Verify if the Volume Group has been created or not with command “vgscan“.

6) Create new Logical Volume using “lvcreate” command.

Here, 5000M is the size of Logical Volume.

7) Format the swap Volume Group to used as a swap device.

Check Volume Path

Format the Volume

7) Switch Off the existing Swap Space using command “swapoff” and then verify it using “free -m”

8) Now open “/etc/fstab” file and search for

Change it to the Swap Volume we have created

9) Switch on the swap space by executing the command “swapon”

Now check the swap size

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