[mdlug] Linux VMs - virtual disk best practices

[Michael ORourke]

Which brings up the next logical question: how do you know if your virtual 
disks needs re-aligning?

-Mike
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Pritts" <danno at dogcheese.net>
To: "MDLUG's Main discussion list" <mdlug at mdlug.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2013 1:45 PM
Subject: Re: [mdlug] Linux VMs - virtual disk best practices


> 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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>
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