This blog article is about the I/O size or block sizes in virtualized environments. I am sure you came along this if you are dealing with databases or other systems. Do you remember it would be best to keep a Microsoft SQL DB on a 64 KB formatted volume or was that the NTFS allocation size, wait was the storage system involved here as well? So I can tell you that if you still believe a Microsoft SQL server operates with only 64 KB blocks that this is not true as there are many kinds of block sizes dependent on what the SQL DB is doing. There is clearly confusion between I/O size and the NTFS allocation size, VMFS block size or NFS block size. On top you have an underlying storage system which is organised in volumes while using meta structures to organise underlying physical disks or flash. This blog article hopefully shines a little bit of light into this. The following figure shows a 64 KiB Write I/O traversing through the different levels we use in a virtualized environment.
