Tool: UBERAlign by Nick Weaver

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/