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 a working installation of vSphere Client. No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it...

The first thing you have to counter is the VMFS partition alignment as follows:

1. The alignment of your VMFS partitions can affect performance and it happens only if you create the datastore using CLI since the vSphere Client is not impacted by misalignment. Like other disk-based file systems, VMFS suffers a penalty when the partition is unaligned. Using the VMware vSphere 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 in Guest OS then it automatically aligns partitions using a default...