Recently I had to install Oracle on a virtual machine but didn’t find out until after I’d spun up of the machine that Oracle required at least 2GB of swap space, my machine did not have enough.
Thankfully it’s quite simple to increase swap space, using VMWare ESX, simple add a new drive to the machine as you normally would, I used 5GB.
Detecting the new SCSI drive and partitioning it
This bit is simple, I’m going to assume you’re logged in as root.
sudo echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/**host0**/scan && fdisk -l
If host0 doesn’t work, try changing to host1, host2 etc.
Now we need to format the drive, for me it was /dev/sdb.
sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb
Create a new logical partition, set it’s type to 82 Linux Swap and simply write the changes.
Adding swap
Next we simply add the swap space to the machine and enable it, for me it was /dev/sdb5
sudo mkswap /dev/sdb5
sudo swapon /dev/sdb5
Add on reboot
And now we simply need to be sure to add the swap when the machine reboots. Open the following file:
/etc/fstab
And add
/dev/sdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0
Simple.
