Top 10 things you must read about VMFS and Virtual Disks

By Eric Siebert
published: Thursday, January 22 2009

VMware Virtual Machine File System: Technical Overview and Best Practices

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmfs-best-practices-wp.pdf

A white paper from VMware that gives a technology overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. It also provides best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS.

Recommendations for Aligning VMFS Partitions

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_partition_align.pdf

A white paper from VMware that lists a summary of performance testing results, recommendations for VMware VMFS partition alignment, and the steps needed to create aligned VMware VMFS partitions.

Advanced VMFS Configuration and Troubleshooting

http://www.vmworld.com/mylearn?classID=11674

A VMworld 2007 presentation (free registration required) that covers technical information on VMFS volumes, backing up metadata, SCSI reservations, partition alignment and more.

ESX Server Raw Device Mapping

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx25_rawdevicemapping.pdf

A white paper from VMware that covers what RDMs are, when to use them and when not to, how to manage RDMs and technical information on RDMs.

Performance Characteristics of VMFS and RDM using a SAN

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/performance_char_vmfs_rdm.pdf

A white paper from VMware that covers the performance differences between using VMFS datasources for virtual disks and Raw Device Mappings. It describes an overview of the technologies, the test environment used, performance results and conclusions.

VMware Virtual Disks - Virtual Disk Format 1.1

http://www.vmware.com/app/vmdk/?src=vmdk

A white paper from VMware that provides a high-level introduction to the layout of the files that make up a VMware virtual disk and drills down into the details of the data structures inside the virtual disk files.

A Few Technical Threads - Part 1: RDMs

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/08/a-few-technical.html

A good technical blog post from Chad Sakac of EMC that covers what features work when using RDMs and what don’t and when to use RDMs.

A Few Technical Threads - Part 2: VMFS Resignaturing

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/08/a-few-technic-1.html

A good technical blog post from Chad Sakac of EMC that covers why VMFS volumes get resignatured and tips to avoid resignaturing.

Using VMware Converter to resize virtual disk files (Pt. 1)

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1322236,00.html

A blog post that covers methods for resizing virtual disk files including use Converter, the VI Client and vmkfstools

Increasing virtual disk partition size using DISKPART or GpartEd (Pt. 2)

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1324177,00.html

A blog post that covers methods for increasing the size of existing disk partitions once a virtual disk has been increased in size using Windows tools and Gnome Partition Editor.