Modifying the Nano Server Pagefile

This weekend, I’ve been working on a little pet project using an ultra-small form factor PC that I’ve got setup running Nano Server and Boot from VHD. The setup is great and ideal for my use case however there is a problem when using Boot from VHD and that is that the operating system you are […]

This weekend, I’ve been working on a little pet project using an ultra-small form factor PC that I’ve got setup running Nano Server and Boot from VHD.

The setup is great and ideal for my use case however there is a problem when using Boot from VHD and that is that the operating system you are booting cannot host a pagefile inside the VHD file. When you boot a PC using a native boot VHD file, the pagefile will be automatically created on the physical partition with the most available free space and set to System Managed which means that the pagefile will swell and shrink according to demand and not perhaps on the disk or partition you want it to be on.

I started the journey trying to modify the pagefile configuration however I quickly discovered that even the PowerShell Cmdlets recommended by many other people online to use with Server Core don’t work because they rely on using WMI to modify the parameters and if you try these, you’ll very quickly find that Nano Server only accepts and extremely small subset of WMI PowerShell Cmdlets, presumably down to the compressed WMI database in Nano.

Luckily, I found one set of Cmdlets that do work on Nano Server and allows you to configure your pagefile as you desire.

Set-CimInstance -Property @{AutomaticManagedPageFile = $False}

$PageFile = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PageFileSetting
$PageFile | Remove-CimInstance

New-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PageFileSetting -Property  @{Name= "$("P"):\pagefile.sys"}
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PageFileSetting | Set-CimInstance -Property @{InitialSize = 4096; MaximumSize = 4096}

As you’ll see, I’m using P as my pagefile drive volume and I’m setting the initial and maximum sizes to 4096MB. Simply change these to suit your needs and job’s a good one.