Disk Alignment - VMWare / HP EVA4400

[baylissmark]

Hi all,

We have an HP EVA 4400 with VMware ESX 5.0 and so forth. My question is:

What disk block size do we use for the Windows 2008 R2 OS and any RDMs?

HP says that we dont have to worry about the block size at the SAN level and with VMFS 5 / Windows 2008 R2 everything sorts itself out. I just checked some VMs the W2K8 OS is 4K block size and the data drives (RDMs) are 64K.

Am I missing something? Come from Dell / EMC background.

Thanks in advance.

Mark

[a_p_]

With Windows Vista/2008 and later Microsoft aligns partitions  at 1MB, so this will work for almost every storage system/stripe size. With earlier versions 63 blocks (31.5kB) were used, which caused the misalignment.

What you mention is the NTFS cluster size, which actually is not related to disk alignment, but can improve application performance for e.g. SQL Databases.

André