Determining the right size for your VMware VMFS data stores
Choosing a virtual disk type for VMware ESX: Raw, thick and thin disks
Using VMware Converter to resize virtual disk files (Pt. 1)
Increasing virtual disk partition size using DISKPART or GpartEd (Pt. 2)
Extend boot volume of Windows 2003 VM
Moving Virtual Disks to or from ESX Server
ESX Server Raw Device Mapping
Performance Characteristics of VMFS and RDM (ESX 3.0.1)
Performance Characteristics of VMFS and RDM using a SAN (ESX 3.5)
What VMware features work on RDMs and which don’t?
Keeping your Disks Aligned
Web based VMDK descriptor file creator
Mbrscan/mbralign
Aligning disk partitions to boost virtual machine performance
Recommendations for Aligning VMFS Partitions
Best Practices for File System Alignment in Virtual Environments
Storage Block Alignment with VMware Virtual Infrastructure
Storage Alignment and VMFS Block Sizes
VMware Virtual Machine File System: Technical Overview and Best Practices
What causes VMFS volumes to get resignatured?
VMFS Best Practices
Understanding VMFS volumes
VMFS Volume Management
VMFS – Best Practices, and counter-FUD
VMFS Storage Sizing for Maximum Performance
Tag: Virtual Disks
May 10 2009
Virtual Disk Links
Mar 26 2009
Top 10 things you must read about VMFS & Virtual Disks
- VMware Virtual Machine File System: Technical Overview and Best Practices – A white paper from VMware that gives a technology overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. It also provides best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS.
- Recommendations for Aligning VMFS Partitions – A white paper from VMware that lists a summary of performance testing results, recommendations for VMware VMFS partition alignment, and the steps needed to create aligned VMware VMFS partitions.
- Advanced VMFS Configuration and Troubleshooting – A VMworld 2007 presentation (free registration required) that covers technical information on VMFS volumes, backing up metadata, SCSI reservations, partition alignment and more.
- ESX Server Raw Device Mapping – A white paper from VMware that covers what RDMs are, when to use them and when not to, how to manage RDMs and technical information on RDMs.
- Performance Characteristics of VMFS and RDM using a SAN – A white paper from VMware that covers the performance differences between using VMFS datasources for virtual disks and Raw Device Mappings. It describes an overview of the technologies, the test environment used, performance results and conclusions.
- VMware Virtual Disks – Virtual Disk Format 1.1 – A white paper from VMware that provides a high-level introduction to the layout of the files that make up a VMware virtual disk and drills down into the details of the data structures inside the virtual disk files.
- A Few Technical Threads – Part 1: RDMs – A good technical blog post from Chad Sakac of EMC that covers what features work when using RDMs and what don’t and when to use RDMs.
- A Few Technical Threads – Part 2: VMFS Resignaturing – A good technical blog post from Chad Sakac of EMC that covers why VMFS volumes get resignatured and tips to avoid resignaturing.
- Using VMware Converter to resize virtual disk files (Pt. 1) – A blog post from Tech Target that covers methods for resizing virtual disk files including use Converter, the VI Client and vmkfstools.
- Increasing virtual disk partition size using DISKPART or GpartEd (Pt. 2) – A blog post from Tech Target that covers methods for increasing the size of existing disk partitions once a virtual disk has been increased in size using Windows tools and Gnome Partition Editor.
