Holy Shnikies – does this actually work? And is it supported? (running mbralign with a snapshot, then (presumably) deleting the snapshot to merge the delta files back into the newly aligned vmdk – brilliant!)
We took downtime on all VMs to align them – the big ones took hours...even with 10gig networking – can’t believe I had not seen mention of this before.
How do you deal with the linux VMs which need boot file modification post alignment to (re)boot successfully?

FWIW, all our VMs are aligned now – we run a daily mbrscan report to pickup any stray misaligned vmdk files (usually they are virtual appliances)



On 8/26/11 1:05 PM, "Chris Muellner" <chris@northlandusa.com> wrote:

If you take a NetApp snapshot of the datastore then you can run the mbralign scan against the snapshotted -flat.vmdk(s) without having to power off the virtual machines.

--
Fletcher Cocquyt
Principal Engineer
Information Resources and Technology (IRT)
Stanford University School of Medicine

http://vmadmin.info