by I hit a bug on my openldap server (a virtual machine) that ate up almost all the ram and even though I restarted the openldap (a 30 second process) would only free up a bit of ram. So now the server is running in 300KB of memory and swapping with high load averages and wait times. I really do not want to restart the server in the middle of the day (a 5 minute process) as that will affect around 8000 people. Hmm, what to do?
I figured if I could make swap faster this machine might make it to the end of the work day. I moved the virtual disk using storage vmotion from the standard sata disks that most of my vm's run on to my special array that is SSD's backed by 15K SAS disks for my high IO machines. It actually worked! It is still swapping, but now the load average is under 1, wait % under 10, and it looks like the machine will make it until tonight when I can reboot the machine.