Hi,
I have a whole bunch of misaligned VMs and the Netapp tool requires shutting then all down to align them.
Could VMWare make a SVMotion plugin with the option to properly align on the destination volume?
That's very hard to do, the alignment is done within the VMDK and will differ per VM. I would rather not have VMware altering my VMDK's. Although I can imagine you can't have much downtime it is the safest method. And I'd rather have downtime then a corrupted OS filesystem because of a shifted bit.
Duncan
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FYI - As of VMWorld 2009, Vizioncore released their VConverter product as Freeware. It does 64KB alignment during a P->V operation. It might actually be possible to use it to do a V->V type scenario to do the alignment but I've never tried it.
I'm trying vConverter from Vizioncore now - P2V and V2V to check the alignment afterwards.
Why doesn't VMWare's Converter align??
Does vConverter do Linux P2V?
VCP
vConverter finished but both the V2V and the P2V (windows 2000, 2003 respectively) resulted in misaligned VMs (according to Netapp's mbrscan)
config: vSphere 4.0, Netapp NFS datastores
I guess we are back to mbralign and downtime for the VMs.
VCP
Go into the OS itself and look at the offset in msinfo32 - not sure how the mbrscan tool accounts for conversions - if it's wrong I think there is an option in the settings for for vconverter to align - maybe that wasn't checked.
