CentOS - Nov 2009 - Partition alignment

I'll be setting up a vSphere 4 environment hosting CentOS 5.4 on Netapp
FAS and was curious how you guys are handling the automation of
partition alignment within your linux guests.  I'd like to use cobbler
for dynamically creating kickstart scripts and wasn't sure if I could
align my disk during install some how.  Are there kickstart arguments to
force the alignment on a 4k boundary?  Have any of you had to do this?
Thanks.

Scott McClanahan wrote:
> I'll be setting up a vSphere 4 environment hosting CentOS 5.4 on Netapp
> FAS and was curious how you guys are handling the automation of
> partition alignment within your linux guests.  I'd like to use cobbler
> for dynamically creating kickstart scripts and wasn't sure if I could
> align my disk during install some how.  Are there kickstart arguments to
> force the alignment on a 4k boundary?  Have any of you had to do this?
My storage array abstracts the disks to the point where there is
no need for alignment(if you wanted to try there's no way you could
determine how best to do it), and the intelligent caching on the back
end automatically takes care of doing things like full stripe writes
and maximizing spindle efficiency -

http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/vv-mgmt.png

So no I haven't had to do it, and don't plan to in the future.

nate

From: Scott McClanahan <smcclanahan at sigovs.com>
> I'd like to use cobbler
> for dynamically creating kickstart scripts and wasn't sure if I could
> align my disk during install some how.  Are there kickstart arguments to
> force the alignment on a 4k boundary?  Have any of you had to do this?
Personaly, I run a pre_kickstart script that partition and format the volumes as
I want.
Then I just use --onpart and --noformat in the kickstart.

JD