Disk Alignment

[ericsowa]

We have over 500 machines that need to be re-aligned for our new netapp for NFS. We want to use a free or opensouce method. Can someone point us in the right direction of a application or tools. We have already looked into software like Vizoncore's VOptimizer Pro. We are trying to use netapp De-Dupe and have not seen a storage savings and we think it might be dew to miss alligned disks.

[dominic7]

You can use diskpart.exe, oddly enough I just posted how to do it in this thread like 3 minutes ago:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1287452#1287452

Unfortunately, changing the disk alignment also wipes out the data on the partition. With that many VMs, you should have netapp come in and put it in writing that they can't dedupe because of partition mis-alignment.... that's a mountain of work to do to find out it doesn't make any difference.

[RParker · Accepted solution]

We are trying to use netapp De-Dupe and have not seen a storage savings and we think it might be dew to miss alligned disks.

The pro's of allignment is performance not storage space. Also there are conflicting reports that alignment actually does anything useful. I tried it, and it was proven to be a monumental waste of time, so before you delve into an entire roll out, test out a VM or two to ensure it's beneficial before you go scheduling down time, it may prove to be more trouble than its worth.

Alignment will not help with storage allocation, that is 100% a SAN issue, not VM Ware.