Comments on blog.aarondelp.com: NetApp mbrscan and mbralign for Virtual Machine Al...

"Windows 2008 Server is aligned if the machin...

2011-03-24T16:04:04.998-04:00

"Windows 2008 Server is aligned if the machine was created as a Windows 2008 server. If the machine is upgraded from Windows Server 20003, it will not be aligned. "

OR If your build process is windows 2008 server being pushed from an image file to your VM, there is a chance your not aligned...

Never assume its aligned... check it alwasy :)

@Masa The problem with mbralign bundled with VSC2....

2010-11-15T22:57:56.756-05:00

@Masa The problem with mbralign bundled with VSC2.0 has been fixed in the latest release of mbralign bundled with VSC 2.0.1

Masa - Good catch and thank you for posting! I ha...

2010-11-15T09:04:33.893-05:00

Masa - Good catch and thank you for posting! I haven't had a chance to use the 5.2 version so any information you have is very useful. Thank you again!

Hi, Aaron, I was still having some issues alignin...

2010-11-15T09:02:48.223-05:00

Hi, Aaron,

I was still having some issues aligning Windows VMs (basic disk), and found the following:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1638108

""Error loading operating system" after running mbralign from EHU 5.2 on a VMDK"

Duh!!

"DESCRIPTION:
Under some circumstances, the mbralign utility that is packaged

Sorry, nothing I can add on that one. My experien...

2010-09-27T09:23:37.690-04:00

Sorry, nothing I can add on that one. My experience aligning Linux is very limited.

Tried mbrscan and mbralign on a RH5 VM. a good to...

2010-09-24T22:50:38.527-04:00

Tried mbrscan and mbralign on a RH5 VM. a good tool, did alignment smoothly. But caught one issue.
disk partition overlap start/end cylinder. protential file system crash issue.

any comment?

thanks,

> Disk /dev/sda: 23.6 GB, 23622348288 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2871 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065
> * 512 = 8225280

Hey Masa - Is the disk a dynamic disk? Dynamic Di...

2010-09-10T18:04:09.406-04:00

Hey Masa - Is the disk a dynamic disk? Dynamic Disks don't align and will become unusable in the way you describe if you try to align them. That is the only thing I can think of. Good Luck!

Hi, Aaron! I recently encountered an issue that a...

2010-09-10T13:38:14.946-04:00

Hi, Aaron!

I recently encountered an issue that alignment "appears" to have failed on a W2K8 VM. I hear W2K8 should be aligned automatically, so I assume this VM may have been upgraded from W2K3.
So when I run mbralign command, it goes through all the process, and it says it completed ok. I don't get any error messages. However, when I power on the VM, the console

Hi, Aaron, I finally figured out what I was doing...

2010-08-19T16:46:04.727-04:00

Hi, Aaron,

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. Our environment has many ESX hosts with several shared storage accessible by all of these ESX hosts, and this mbrscan or mbralign --scan requires to be run against the *-flat.vmdk file on the ESX host which is hosting the VM's configuration file, .vmx. I don't remember reading this in documentation, but I probably missed

@anon - There might be a Powercli script out there...

2010-08-17T16:58:02.624-04:00

@anon - There might be a Powercli script out there but I haven't seen one. (I really need to play with PowerCLI someday, just no time right now)

@masa That is interesting. Yes, you either need the vm powered off or you need a VMware snapshot for the virtual machine or you will get the resource busy error. Are you sure that the VMware snapshot isn't timing out?

You

Hi, Aaron, I am getting "Device busy" m...

2010-08-17T15:38:42.074-04:00

Hi, Aaron,

I am getting "Device busy" message after taking the snapshot for a VM for mbrscan. Does the VM have to be shut down after taking a VM? I took the snapshot from vSphere client with and without "Snapshot VM's memory" and "Quiesce guest file system", and it didn't seem to help out. Once the snap shot is taken, you still run mbrscan against

Is there a powercli script to shutdown the VM and ...

2010-07-28T21:36:00.238-04:00

Is there a powercli script to shutdown the VM and kick-off the mbralign process on the vm

You can do citrix servers aswell but there is a pr...

2010-06-30T13:28:27.229-04:00

You can do citrix servers aswell
but there is a procedure to change the drive letters first in registry and then changing the userinit.exe path.

Thanks for the comment Eric! The new tool is out:...

2009-10-27T12:46:20.202-04:00

Thanks for the comment Eric!

The new tool is out:

http://blogs.netapp.com/storage_nuts_n_bolts/2009/10/netapp-virtual-storage-console-vsc-for-esx-ready-for-download.html

I am hoping to play with it soon.

Hi Aaron, Thanks for putting that post together. ...

2009-10-16T08:46:26.092-04:00

Hi Aaron,
Thanks for putting that post together. I think its a great resource. While I can't comment on specifics, 'shortly' is probably overly optimistic with regard to a plugin. You can however use mbralign and mbrscan on ESX 4.0. In fact the NetApp VMware Host Utilities Kit is fully supported on ESX 4.0.
Thanks again for all your work on this!
Cheers,
-Eric