Sector alignment for running Ubuntu VMs on Hyper-V

Question

Hello,

We've purchased a new Dell server with 4 * 1.2TB Hard Drive SAS ISE 12Gbps 10k 512n configured in RAID 5.

This server will primarily run Ubuntu VMs (around 14) and these VMs will run MySQL databases. The host will run Windows Server 2019 Standard Edition.

I found a lot of literature saying that Partition boundaries, Sector boundaries and VHDX files should be all be aligned in order to have optimum performance.

Questions:

1. Is this alignment need still relevant? Is it automatically handled by Windows?
2. If this criteria applicable to the server configuration that I have, how do I ensure that:
   a. The partition was created with correct alignment
   b. VHDX file is correctly aligned to Sector Boundaries
   c. Ubuntu OS has created correctly aligned partitions inside VM during installation

Thank You!

Answer 1

Hi,

The partitions are automatically aligned on Windows Server 2019 so you don't have to do that manually.

To make sure the partitions are aligned, please run msinfo32 and click Components - Storage - Disks. If the Partition Starting Offset is divisible by 4096 then the partition is aligned.

Best Regards,
Ian Xue

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