Vmware disk alignment windows

VMWare says that if the block size is unknown, to use a multiple of 8KB. This is the part that's a pain. K0DE: You don't happen to align your Windows system disks do you? Built a virtual machine and put a D: and E: drive on it, aligned D: and left E: natural.

I got the same numbers for both. Then I realized that the SAN has a massive write cache so I'm not really going to see much difference unless I completely saturate the cache - and I can't know how much data does that because there are 25 other virtual machines talking to it too.

There isn't a good way to benchmark this, is there? Aside from having a completely isolated system. How massive is the cache? Most I have seen are Mb - 4GB. Most tests out there have configurable test sizes, so just ensure your test size exceeds your cache size. You can also test alignment with reads as well. Saw this link on Scott Lowe's site. Great if you own Netapp. Yes, all our VMs are. I'd be careful about that, anything you do that can saturate your cache is going to bring the system to it's knees.

Our oldish 's have 8 gig of cache per head, I'd hate to think how much I'd have to pound on it to fill that up. Any performance testing should be done knowing that if it is involved in a production system, it will likely impact the production system. Wish I had a Netapp just to play with. That is definitely a hole in my experience. I have a friend that works there Netapp doing performance coding to their OS..

How do you manage that? Have a system specifically for setting up new LUNs before installation? Interestingly enough, looks like and Vista do not have the alignment problem according to NetApp Now you can create a template of this virtual machine and use this template each time you need to deploy a new virtual machine with Windows Server Prev Next The following figure shows an example of correct partition alignment: In this example, any cluster the smallest unit of data in the guest OS file system is aligned with the boundaries of an NFS block, and reading from or writing to a cluster requires only access to one NFS block.

At the same time, virtual machines running non-modern systems for example, Windows Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 do usually have misaligned partitions, which is shown in the figure below: In this example, clusters of the guest OS file system do not match the boundaries of NFS blocks, and reading from or writing to a cluster requires access to several NFS blocks.

Once you have it at hand, follow the steps below: Create a new disk for the virtual machine. Start the virtual machine and log in to it using SSH. Create a primary partition, and set the starting block number for the created partition. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable. The number of cylinders for this disk is set to There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than , and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1 software that runs at boot time e.

Calling ioctl to re-read partition table. Syncing disks. Once you have it at hand, you can use the diskpart or diskpar utility depending on your operating system to align the disk: Create a new disk for the virtual machine.

Select the disk you want to align. Then I used diskmgmt. I also set the second to active though this might not have been necessary. I removed the second drive from my Win2K8 vm and added it as the only drive to my newly-created Windows Server Standard bit vm. NSX Reference Poster.

During the past few weeks, my NSX partner in crime, the Sr. Do you know the LUNs on your environment might have different versions? To check tha LUN version, on the configuratio ESXi host upgrade failed - 0x8b in position Most of my time as a Consulting Architect at VMware Professional Services I spend with clients, helping them to create innovative solut