VMware vSwap Best Practices on Nimble Storage

[Corman]

We are currently migrating from an IBM Storwize v7000 Gen2 to a Nimble Storage array AF-20. The majority of the volumes on the AF-20 are then replicated to an HF-20 at our DR site.

Previously we had configured our vShere environemnt to store vSwap files on a seperate volume. The only reason we did this was to avoid replication of swap files. It wasn't about performance as it's extremely rare for swapping to occur in our environment. Now it's time to move our Virtual Machines to the Nimble Array. However I'm not really sure what to do with the swap files. Since Nimble is vm-aware, will it simply ignore them and not replicate these blocks? Or perhaps I should create a new volume on the Nimble array for vSwap files and disable deduplication? Or maybe it just doesn't matter? What's your take on this? 

[Seenivasan-XP]

you certainly could create a new VMFS volume for the swap files - it's a plausible design for replicated datastores. If swap files are stored within a replicated VMFS, then yes we're going to replicate those changed blocks to the DR site. I wouldn't mess around with turning off dedupe though - just leave it on for the whole system.

OR they could look into using VVols and replicating on the per-VM level instead (which eradicates these design considerations completely).