A systems administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue on a virtual machine (VM) that hosts a memory-intensive database application. Monitoring tools show high memory utilization within the guest OS and significant disk latency on the datastore where the VM's primary OS disk is located. The administrator determines that the guest OS is heavily using its page file, which resides on the same virtual disk as the operating system. Which of the following is the MOST effective action to mitigate this performance bottleneck?
Increase the size of the page file on the primary OS disk to 1.5 times the amount of allocated RAM.
Add two additional vCPUs to the virtual machine's configuration.
Disable the guest OS page file and allocate additional memory to the VM.
Create a new virtual disk on a separate, high-performance datastore and move the page file to this new disk.
The correct action is to create a new virtual disk on a separate, high-performance datastore and move the page file to it. The scenario describes a classic I/O bottleneck where the heavy, random-access I/O operations of the page file are competing with the OS and application I/O on the same disk, causing high latency. Moving the page file to a dedicated virtual disk on a faster or less-utilized datastore isolates the page file's I/O from the OS disk's I/O, directly addressing the contention and improving performance. Increasing the page file's size on the same congested disk would not solve the latency issue. Adding vCPUs is irrelevant as the problem is memory and disk I/O, not CPU processing. Disabling the page file is risky and could cause the memory-intensive application or the OS to crash if physical RAM is exhausted.
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Why does moving the page file to a separate virtual disk improve performance?
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What is a datastore in virtualization?
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Why is disabling the page file not recommended in this scenario?