1 or 2 vmdk for OS and Data drives

[Mizzou_RobMan]

What are most people doing with OS and Data drives? In other words, are you using 1 vmdk for OS and a 2nd vmdk for data drives? Would this create 2 connections to the datastore or just 1?

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

We use a separate drive for everything. Makes it so much easier if you ever want to expand a partition. As long as you store all your .vmdks of the guest(s) in question, on the same LUN there will be a single connection.

[Mizzou_RobMan]

A follow-up curiosity...what size are you doing for OS drive size? Windows 2003 specifically.

[Troy_Clavell]

18GB C: drive for 2003 guests.

[a_p_]

With Windows 2003 make sure to do the disk alignment on both drives.

André

[Mizzou_RobMan]

So how about win2k8? We were thinking 20 or 25Gb...

[Mizzou_RobMan]

Here is a "stupid" question, but how can I tell if they are aligned or how do you align them?

[Troy_Clavell]

30GB C: for 32bit

40GB C: for 64bit

you only have to align your W2K3 guests, W2K8 is already aligned. To get the starting offset run msinfo32 and look under disks.

To align your OS partition you will have to boot up a WinPE disk before the OS is installed. use diskpart to select your disk (usually disk 0) then type

 create partition primary align=64

for data disks, just attach a new drive and align the raw disk.