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Document Information
| Document Number: | 489426978 |
| Functional Area: | System i Integration with BladeCenter and System x |
| Subfunctional Area: | iSCSI |
| Sub-Subfunctional Area: | General |
| OS/400 Release: | 6.1 |
| Product: | I5/OS (5761SS100) |
| Product Release: | N/A |
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Document Title
Aligning Storage Partitions for Windows Server 2008
Document Description
Beginning with Windows Vista® and extending to Windows Server 2008 (KB923332), http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923332, file system alignment for basic partitions is defaulted to using 1 MB boundaries rather than the legacy BIOS policy of aligning partitions on cylinder boundaries. This improves overall system performance and accommodates underlying implementation factors affecting performance such as RAID, SAN, application OP sizes, and so on. This also includes the underlying support for virtual disks provided by IBM i that are used by iSCSI attached Integrated servers.
In the IBM i environment, virtual disks (storage spaces) that are partitioned using Windows Server 2008 should use the OFFSET(*ALIGNLGLDSK) option of the Create NWS Storage Space (CRTNWSSTG) command to calibrate the storage space, file system, and IBM i page alignment, and optimize the virtual disk performance.
Note: The INSWNTSVR command does this automatically for the system drive for the server.
Storage spaces that are partitioned using earlier versions of a Windows Server that use previous BIOS alignment policies should continue to use OFFSET(*ALIGNLGLPTN) or the default OFFSET(*FORMAT) when using *NTFS, *FAT, *FAT32 or *NTFSQR formats. These storage spaces are already calibrated for alignment.
Additional support is available in the Microsoft Windows DISKPART 2.0 command line utility to control partition alignment to accommodate RAID, SAN, and environments with special needs such as Exchange or SQL server.
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