Realigning misaligned vmdk partitions

[caddo]

Hi,

during a migration project for a customer i've been asked to move current virtual machines to a new disk array storage, so far so good thanks to storage vmotion.

Problem is that most of the Windows VM that hold a drive letter other than C: have partitions misaligned; i was trying to think of a way other than adding another virtual disk and copy everything to the new disk then changing the drive letter to the new one and erasing the old disk because this is time consuming it requires downtime.

Anyone have some idea about hoe to do this in a better and smarter way?

Thank you.

[DSTAVERT]

You can have a look at http://vizioncore.com/solutions/storage which can do the job for you.

[DSTAVERT]

If you are adventurous you can use gparted to move the partition. I use gparted from a linux livecd and you can modify the existing partition without loosing data.

[a_p_]

Is the alignment a requirement of your customer?

If not, I wouldn't bother with aligning the partitions unless the VM's disks are heavily utilized (e.g. high performance database). For most lighter workloads you may not benefit much from aligning the partitions due to usually large caches of the storage systems.

I usually only align partitions for new VMs and leave migrated/P2V'd partitions untouched.

André

[caddo]

More than a performance requirement it's a project requirement, not because they need it but just because they asked for it.

Usually i align partitions on new VMs as well but the subject started my curiosity and even if in the end i will be able to convince my customer that it's not worth the fuss i still wanted to see what other people do to take care of this problem.

[a_p_]

OK, undersood.

So, if this is a customer requirement you may not want to present a supported tool to do the alignment.Take a look at the link DSTAVERT provided, to read about Vizioncore's (sorry Quest's) vOptimizer Pro.

André