[mdlug] Linux VMs - virtual disk best practices

[Jonathan Billings]

One of the reasons why partition tables are good on virtual disks is
because you often want to make sure to align the partitions with the
blocks of the underlying storage.  You don't want to have an unaligned
partition to cross the underlying storage's stripe boundary.  You also
want to make sure that the block size of the filesystem matches up to
the stripe/block/chunk size of the underlying storage.

There's a nice graphic on this blog post that does a good job of
visually demonstrating alignment performance benefits:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/08/guest-os-partition-alignment.html

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>