Factors that affect storage performance
Storage performance is affected by many factors; however, some of them are really important. These are:
- VMFS partition alignment
- Spanned VMFS volumes
- SCSI reservation
Getting ready
To step through this recipe, you will need one or more running ESXi Servers, a vCenter Server, and vSphere Web Client. No other prerequisites are required.
How to do it...
The first thing you have to counter is the VMFS partition alignment, as follows:
- The alignment of your VMFS partitions can affect performance, and it happens only if you create the datastore using CLI since vSphere Web Client is not impacted by misalignment. Like other disk-based file systems, VMFS suffers a penalty when the partition is unaligned. Using VMware vSphere Web Client to create VMFS datastores avoids this problem because it automatically aligns the datastores along the 1 MB boundary:
If you are using Windows 2008 or later in your guest OS, then it automatically aligns partitions using a default starting...
