We all know that one of the biggest performance killers in our virtual environments is the wonderful alignment of partitions so that they may work in harmony and produce many I/Os with our SANs. There are a few good tools out there for us to use but we are often caught in the middle of having to purchase the product or only have access to a vendor specific application for doing this.
The wait is over! Let the alignment begin!#
Presenting UBERAlign, a tool for VMware Virtual Machine alignment and Space Reclamation
Some of the features:
- Allows for fast alignment checking of virtual machines with detailed logging.
- Can perform alignment to any offset you want. Even the crazy ones that you shouldn’t choose.
- Works with both Windows 2000/XP**/2003/2008 (NTFS)** and** Linux Distros (EXT2/EXT3/EXT4).**
- Is able to work on NTFS boot drives perfectly. It does this by rewriting NTFS Metadata (the right way).
- Auto detects Windows 2008 and Windows 7 native installs (alignment not needed). Will not touch a System Reserved Partition (important for Windows 2008).
- Preserves all Windows drive mapping (AFAIK only one to do so). This means no having to remap drive letters and complete support for non “C:\” system drives with some Windows builds (some Citrix stuff).
- Completely Storage Array agnostic. That’s right: if it connects to vSphere and host storage UBERAlign will work with it.
That list is only a small portion of the feature list. The best part of all of this is that this tools is completely free. Thanks to Nick over at Nickapedia (http://nickapedia.com) for taking the time to develop such a great tool and bring it into the community for that awesome price of FREE!
Head over to Nickapedia to read more and download the tool. The link is: http://nickapedia.com/2011/11/03/straighten-up-with-a-new-uber-tool-presenting-uberalign/
