Disk alignment necessary on 2003 VM with HP EVA 8400

[sdaeme]

Is is necessary to do disk aligment on windows 2003 server vm's on HP eva 8400 vraid 5 storage?

HP best practices are not clear about this. Some people say that it is not necessary with new storageworks versions.  Netapp has some nice whitepapers about this, but HP is not very informative about this, or I can't find it.

What are your experience?

[bulletprooffool]

I'd suggest that until you find a document that says otherwise, it is still worth the effort setting the alignment in your case (for 2003 VMs at least)

[SimonHuizenga]

new versions of Windows (2008) and linux (ubuntu 10.x) are aligned when installing by default.

some posts of alignment:

http://www.vmdamentals.com/?p=988

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/04/08/aligning-your-vms-virtual-harddisks/

[sdaeme]

yes I know 2008 are standard alignt

What is the default align 2003 with 64 KB?

[alefestaedist]

I would say that yes it is still reccomended, from the HP EVA 5000 documentation for Exchange:

HP recommends setting the sector alignment to 64 using DiskPar per Microsoft’s recommendation for new HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) Exchange Server 2003 environments. In existing environments, the key is to properly evaluate and understand the performance of the Exchange environment. If the Exchange 2003 environment is performing well and meeting the customer’s performance requirements, there is no reason to rebuild the architecture to run the DiskPar utility.

"Exchange2003EVA5000PerformanceWhitePaper.doc"

Unfortunately Windows 2003 continue to require disk aligment.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923076/en-us

Alex