[mdlug] Linux VMs - virtual disk best practices

[Dan Pritts]

You are correct that alignment is absolutely critical.

However, my experience with vmware, at least, is that the virtual disks are aligned
properly.  So if you just throw your filesystem at a virtual disk I think you should 
be just fine.

If you find that virtual disks are not aligned properly then you are right, you could
compensate with the partition table.  

On Mar 21, 2013, at 11:41 AM, Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> wrote:

> 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>
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