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Best Practices for VMFS Partition Alignment

For optimal performance in VMware environments, it is important to align virtual machine disk partitions with the underlying storage. This involves aligning the VMware VMFS partitions to a 64KB boundary using vCenter when creating them. It also means aligning the data disk partitions within virtual machines to 1MB boundaries for Windows 2003 and in multiples of 8KB for other systems. Tools like Diskpart can be used to manually align partitions if needed. Following these best practices can improve storage performance by 20-40%.

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197 views2 pages

Best Practices for VMFS Partition Alignment

For optimal performance in VMware environments, it is important to align virtual machine disk partitions with the underlying storage. This involves aligning the VMware VMFS partitions to a 64KB boundary using vCenter when creating them. It also means aligning the data disk partitions within virtual machines to 1MB boundaries for Windows 2003 and in multiples of 8KB for other systems. Tools like Diskpart can be used to manually align partitions if needed. Following these best practices can improve storage performance by 20-40%.

Uploaded by

kuldeep_singh_144
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Disk Alignment for Windows VM’s

For VMware environments it is best practice to insure alignment of the VMFS partition
and the OS (Windows & Linux).

Best practices for VMFS alignment are documented in the VMware Performance Best
Practices for vSphere 4.1 document:

The alignment of your file system partitions can impact performance. Estimates run
anywhere from 20%-40%. Like other disk-based file systems, VMFS suffers a penalty
when the partition is unaligned. Using the vCenter or vSphere Client to create VMFS
partitions avoids this problem since it automatically aligns the partitions along the 64KB
boundary. VMFS’s must be aligned when using either block or NFS storage protocols.

If you created the VMFS partition prior to vSphere 4.0 or didn’t use the vSphere client to
create the VMFS partition you must manually align your VMFS partitions. Check your
storage vendor’s recommendations for the partition starting block. If your storage
vendor makes no specific recommendation, use a starting block that is a multiple of
8KB. EMC recommends 64KB for all storage arrays.

In order to monitor storage IO impact, use the esxtop or resxtop utility.

For Windows OS alignment best practices:


Once you have aligned your VMware VMFS partitions, you also need to align the data
file system partitions within your virtual machines.

Note: Aligning the boot disk in the virtual machine is neither recommended nor
required. Align only the data disks in the virtual machine.

For Windows 2003 Basic and Dynamic Disks:


Microsoft recommends aligning virtual machine partitions to 1 MB track boundaries for
most Windows systems when using shared storage such as CLARiiON (see Microsoft
TechNet article 929491). In addition, when formatting an NTFS volume, set the
allocation size to a multiple of 8KB, otherwise set it to the value that the application
recommends.

Use the [Link] tool to create the disk partition and to specify a starting offset of
2,048 sectors (1 megabyte). Diskpart is a destructive process requiring you to backup
and restore your data as part of the process. There are tools such as visioncore
vOptimizerPro.

Windows 2008 server data file systems are aligned by default. But just because a VM is
running Windows 2008 it may still be unaligned. If you did an in-place upgrade of
Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 the disk partitions were never modified.
The best practice is avoid disk alignment issues is:
 Use vCenter or vSphere Client to create all VMFS’s
 Create aligned partitions in your VMware templates and provision your VM’s
using your aligned template
Do it once, do it right – every machine you deploy from the template will be aligned.

Good references on this topic include:


 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
puts-fingers-in-his-ears-la-la-la/

EMC publishes the complete best practice for optimal VMware configurations in techbooks. The
techbooks are all publicly available on the EMC Resource Library.

CLARiiON:
[Link]
[Link]

Celerra:
[Link]
[Link]

Symmetrix:
[Link]
[Link]

If you love EMC :-), you can get them in physical book form here:
[Link]
=HNirXcfI

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