<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:15 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <<a href="mailto:nkadel@gmail.com">nkadel@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im"> > On the plus side, using 4k sector sizes for guests over the network like > this seems to have a very positive effect on the backend disk IO > performance. </div>I'd love to do so. Even aligning the partitions on 4096 byte boundaries helps tremendously with NetApps providing the virtual disk images over NFS, but I'm going bugfutz trying to get this into kickstart tools. I'm hoping that RHEL 6's kickstart tools will make it easier. <div><div></div> </div></blockquote></div> I took the approach below for kickstarting with rh el 5 guests in VMware and manage partition alignment with starting block of 128 when connected to EMC storage arrays. Probably you can adapt for your needs of sector size, disks layout and also see if any other change is required in rh el 6. I have not tried yet with it. PS: mind the new lines too HIH, Gianluca %pre #!/bin/sh LOGFILE=/tmp/ks_preinstall.log echo "" > $LOGFILE # clear mbr dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 2>>$LOGFILE fdisk /dev/sda << -TXT >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 n p 1 +100M x b 1 128 r n p 2 t 1 8e w -TXT SECSIZE=$(fdisk -lu /dev/sda | grep sda2 | awk '{print $2}' 2>> $LOGFILE) export NEWSECSIZE=$(expr $ $SECSIZE / 128 + 1 $ \* 128 2>> $LOGFILE) fdisk /dev/sda << -TXT >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 x b 2 $NEWSECSIZE r w -TXT Instead in install section: part /boot --fstype ext3 --onpart=sda1 part pv.01 --onpart=sda2 volgroup VolGroup01 pv.01 logvol / --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol00 --vgname=VolGroup01 --size=5120 logvol /var/log --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol01 --vgname=VolGroup01 --size=512 logvol /var/opt --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol02 --vgname=VolGroup01 --size=512 logvol /opt --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol03 --vgname=VolGroup01 --size=1536 logvol swap --fstype swap --name=LogVol04 --vgname=VolGroup01 --size=256 Also, in post section I have something like this to copy the logs and check any errors of the pre install phase: %post --nochroot LOGFILE=/mnt/sysimage/root/ks_postinstall.log LOGDIR=/mnt/sysimage/root/kslog-$(date +%d%m%Y) mkdir $LOGDIR # Copy log files in log dir cp /tmp/anaconda.log $LOGDIR >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 cp /tmp/ks_preinstall.log $LOGDIR >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 cp /tmp/ks.cfg $LOGDIR >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 %post # Define LOG FILE LOGFILE=/root/ks_postinstall.log echo "" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 ... mv $LOGFILE /root/kslog-* 2> /dev/null