Centos - Use a Hard Drive Partition for Additional Swap Space

Had a Centos server that was crashing because it was running out of swap space as it has 8gb of memory and only a 2gb swap partition. After adding a new 20gb partition to the VM I used the instructions below taken from THIS site to add the new hard drive as the new Swap partion:

Method 1: Use a Hard Drive Partition for Additional Swap Space

If you have an additional hard disk, (or space available in an existing disk), create a partition using fdisk command. Let us assume that this partition is called /dev/sdc1

Now setup this newly created partition as swap area using the mkswap command as shown below.

# mkswap /dev/sdc1

Enable the swap partition for usage using swapon command as shown below.

# swapon /dev/sdc1

To make this swap space partition available even after the reboot, add the following line to the /etc/fstab file.

# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/sdc1               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

Verify whether the newly created swap area is available for your use.

# swapon -s
Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda2                       partition       4192956 0       -1
/dev/sdc1                       partition       1048568 0       -2

# free -k
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3082356    3022364      59992          0      52056    2646472
-/+ buffers/cache:     323836    2758520
Swap:      5241524          0    5241524

Note: In the output of swapon -s command, the Type column will say “partition” if the swap space is created from a disk partition.