I've recently spent quite a bit of time trying to understand the reasons and importance of Disk Alignment in an ESX environment, Is it important? What are the best ways to correct it and how do you prevent misalignment in the first place. With all that being said I ran into a couple of great articles that describe the subject in great detail. Here they are:
The first article was written by Erik Zandboer from
VMdamentals. He published a series on Disk Throughput and in part 3 he describes misalignment in great detail and goes through different methods to correct it. It's a great primer to help understand what's under the covers.
Two other articles
Recommendations for Aligning VMFS Partitions and
Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3 were written by VMware. They are a typical white papers from VMware but do a good job going over the subject. They also go over Best Practices for Storage which I found useful.
The last source is a book that I had the opportunity to read.
NetApp and VMware vSphere - Storage Best Practices . I highly recommend it. The book only cost $15.00 and it really does cover the topic well. It also goes over NetApp in great detail for those that are running NetApp shops. tips, tricks and gotchas in a NetApp world ..... Great resource.
Happy Reading - Scott March
