topic Re: MBRalign in bulk in VMware Solutions Discussions

MBRalign in bulk

pspringfield — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:15:21 GMT

Good Afternoon all,

I'm chatting to a customer (he might even be here - Hi Simon) at the moment about how to deal with performing the MBRalign process for a large number of VMDKs. In this instance, we have 200 to deal with so could be a very labour intensive activity. I'm wondering if anyone has come across any tools or scripts to ease this process.

I'm guessing that some convoluted batch file processing on the command line might be possible btu for me that would take longer the manual conversions!

Any comments welcome.

Kindest Regards,

Pete Springfield (Bell Micro Europe)

Re: MBRalign in bulk

stetson — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:08:01 GMT

You can use mbralign with the destination datastore parameter so that it's like a migration form an old datastore to a new datastore. So only aligned VM's end up in the new datastore. Rather than running this through the ESX console, using a Linux host (or VM) can be much faster. You can also call several Putty sessions to it and just rotate sessions. If enough people get on board, each with designated VM's to "migrate," you may move quicker than you'd think.

Re: MBRalign in bulk

amiller_1 — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 04:56:04 GMT

There was a NetApp blog post recently (can't find it now for some reason) stating that you can get MUCH higher throughput by running mbralign from a Linux box rather than in the Service Console (as the Service Console is relatively resource constrained compared to a regular Linux box).

That doesn't precisely help with doing "in bulk" but should cut the time down somewhat at least (either for one-offs or bulk processing) -- given the # of VM's you're talking about, I'm betting the setup time for a couple of Linux boxes would be more than worth it.

Re: MBRalign in bulk

pspringfield — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:30:21 GMT

I appreciate you taking the time to post your advice Gentlemen. Useful input input there.

All the best,

Pete

Re: MBRalign in bulk

amiller_1 — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:36:57 GMT

Ah ha....found it!

http://blogs.netapp.com/dropzone/2010/04/mbralign-on-steroids.html

Re: MBRalign in bulk

heg — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:19:30 GMT

Hi,

we have 1000+ unaligned virtual servers and use vOptimizer Pro from VizionCore. Alignment can be scheduled and run unattended.