Partition Alignment Best Practices

[epalombizio]

Hello,
Does Starwind have any special recommendations on partition alignment? Hosts are vSphere 5.x, guest VMs are Windows 2008 r2.

Thanks,
E

[anton (staff)]

Stripe size on your RAID should work fine. Doing something like 4MB should fix pretty much everything.

[Anatoly (staff)]

There are no exact recommendations of which stripe size to use. It is a test-based choice. As best practice we recommend at first step to set recommended by vendor and run tests. Then set a bigger value and run tests again. In third step set a smaller value and test again. These 3 results should guide you to the optimal stripe size value to set. In some configuration smaller stripe size value like 4k or 8k give better performance and in some other cases 64k, 128k or even 256k values will give better performance.
Performance of the HA will depend on the performance of the RAID array used. It’s up to the customer to determine the optimal stripe size.