Clariion windows 2003 aligning partitions

The other problem you can run into with a mixture of aligned and misaligned file systems within your guests is that bock level storage dedupe can not work as efficiently. Duncan— Thanks for the post. Sidebar: Linux guest LVM partition alignment is a tricky area not often discussed. You are absolutely spot on, alignment is critical. The lack of alignment results in an array retrieving more data than what the VM is requesting. This results in inefficiencies on the array that leads to requiring more storage hw resources to serve a workload.

As for the VI3 document that Duncan referenced, I have some concerns. While I can agree on the merits of this point I disagree on the recommendation. First aligning system drives is hard to accomplish once the system is deployed.

I believe this may be closer to the actual reason for the recommendation. Misalignment also impacts other technologies like data deduplication. I believe it is fair to say the premise of misalignment impacting NetApp more than other arrays is over simplified, allow me to elaborate.

To begin, what GOS are you running? I know Windows rather well, and as such I will speak to this OS family. The 1MB offset is aligned and optimized for every storage array vendor, protocol, and platform. I would like to thank Microsoft for listening to their storage partners input when they began engineering GPT.

Also, if you upgrade a VM from one of these versions to Windows 7 or the starting partition offset will remain unchanged. When you align you ensure the best performance for VMs on any storage platform, over any storage protocol whether it is an internal cloud or an external cloud provider.

Storage arrays from other vendors store data in other block, or chunk, sizes. In this case the array would retrieve 1MB plus an additional 64KB block. Duncan thanks for raising awareness on this topic and to Chad for correcting the errors found with Celerra NFS datastores. I cover a few additional thoughts on the bottom line regarding how to strategies and tools on my blog. It is about consolidated workloads and the effect it will have as a whole.

Poor monkeys…they must be cold!! Thank you, Tom. Thanks Vaughn for the extensive comment! It really adds value to this discussion and my article in general. Anyway, I would personally also recommend to align everything. Why not if you can? Not doing it will have an impact. Avoiding that overhead will mean you can run more VMs on the same device. And I agree it will most likely read larger chunks than the 4KB mentioned and 1MB is probably closer for many workloads, but I also over exaggerated to get the point across.

Do the NetApp tools work in multi-vendor environments? Duncan — Thanks for raising the awareness of this topic and for the ping to chime in. Can anyone confirm this either way? I even spoke to my NetApp sales rep. I know when they first were released they were meant to be free for all, and vendor neutral. I guess they are only vendor neutral. Great post Duncan! So, how would this play out if your vCenter server is going to be virtual?

Sound about right? The MSA series has a concept of chunk size. The default chunk size is 64 Kbytes, but can be set to 16k or 32k at time of volume creation. The number can be adjusted to improve performance based on expected workload: large chunks are generally more effective for sequential reads while smaller may be better for random. A different approach that can be taken to correct this would be to re-convert the virtual machines V2V with PlateSpin Migrate.

On to the recovery steps… when a disk fails most times it is actively failed by the array itself and not by catestrophic hardware failure. High CRC error rates found on the drive lead the array to kick the drive out. The recovery process is quite simple. Re-insert the second disk which failed. The array will attempt to copy all of the usable data off it onto a hot spare. The reason why the second disk to fail is used is due to it having the last updated data. You must login or register to post a reply.

RSS topic feed. Recently I bought two hard drives to replace a mirror running Windows Did an image backup and, cloned to the new drive. Later I realized that those drives have 4k sectors when I was having performance issues. I know I first have to break the mirror and convert back to basic disk using other software. If you are re-aligning your partitions, then I highly recommend that you backup all of your data before proceeding.

That way if anything goes wrong you will be able to restore your information.