The short answer is, No. Alignment is a performance optimization. A user choosing and provisioning VP does not have the fine-level of control over the LUN with VP needed to align it.

If your workload has the I/O profile that would benefit from alignment, and requires a higher-level, and more deterministic performance than available with VP, a traditional RAID group/LUN should be provisioned.

And what happened with the Windows 2008 host that doesn't need to align volumes (it's done by the OS itself)?

Are the thin LUNs aligned?

Thanks in advance.

Dario

Thin LUNs cannot be aligned because of the way storage is incrementally allocated from the pool of available storage. Any alignment performed by a file system will have not effect.

The whitepaper EMC CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning in its Thin LUNs section describes how storage is allocated. This paper is available on PowerLink.