how to align partitions in vmware

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_partition_align.pdf


Our testing validates the assumption that VMware VMFS partitions that align to 64KB track
boundaries result in reduced latency and increased throughput. Partition alignment on both
physical machines and VMware VMFS partitions prevents performance I/O degradation due to
unaligned tracks



Note:  These recommendations are for block-based storage solutions, not those that are IPbased. I/O characteristics on NFS are different from those of Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage
systems



To check that your existing partitions are aligned, issue the command:
fdisk -lu
The output is similar to:
Device boot Start    End  Blocks Id   System
/dev/sdj1 128  167766794   83883333+   fb  Unknown
Aligned partitions start at 128. If the Start value is 63 (the default), the partition is not aligned
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