Aligning NTFS primary partitions

[WGSSS]

Hi,

I've been trying to find out if it's possible to align the primary partition of a Windows 2003 server after it has been P2V'd. I've been using DISKPART to align new VMDKs for servers, but I can't find much info on aligning existing VMDKs if they haven't been properly aligned at creation.

I know that you can used VMKFSTOOLS to create an aligned VMDK file, and then install the OS on the partition, but is it possible to use VMKFSTOOLS to create an aligned VMDK and then copy the contents of the misaligned VMDK without losing the new parition?

I have tried using the NetApp MBRALIGN tool with mixed results, and have a lot of P2V'd VMs on EMC fibre storage.

Cheers,

G

[AWo]

I uses MBRalign from NetApp, as well against EMC storage (only for testing, no productive system, of coursem of course, of course). It worked fine for me. You had a difference expierence?

BTW, if you have separated system and data there's no need to align the system drives. You may want to consider to move the swap file to another aligned virtual disk. W2K3 guests created under vSphere are aligned.

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

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[rickardnobel]

>You may want to consider to move the swap file to another aligned virtual disk.

Do you find that there is any gain to do this? If there is constant paging then the performance should be quite bad aligned or not, would it not be better the give the VM some more RAM?

[AWo]

>You may want to consider to move the swap file to another aligned virtual disk.

Do you find that there is any gain to do this? If there is constant paging then the performance should be quite bad aligned or not, would it not be better the give the VM some more RAM?

Of course, but that comes to an end somewhere and a swap file will be in place with or without more RAM and Windows will use it either way.

If you put the disk on another LUN, you can distribute the load if your data is on the C:\ drive. Otherwise you have data load and swap load on the same LUN over the same path (if you have redundant storage paths).

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

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[rickardnobel]

If you put the disk on another LUN, you can distribute the load if your data is on the C:\ drive. Otherwise you have data load and swap load on the same LUN over the same path (if you have redundant storage paths).

Well, if having a quite high IO against the C: drive and having too low amount of RAM there could be congestion to the same LUN, but I belive that if given just reasonable enough RAM for the system in question then the swapfile usage will be very low. A very small amount of things will always be put into the pagefile, but that would be pages Windows knows has not been accessed for a long time and will only be retrieved when actually needed again.

"Thanks" to a incorrectly named counter in Task Manager in Windows 2003 it is easy to belive that the page file usage is much higher than it actually is.