Disk Alignment on guest VM's

Hi All,

We have a fair amount of legacy Windows 2003 servers with misaligned disks in our environment and I would like to resolve this to ensure that we are getting the best out of our storage, and not sufferring unnecessary performance degredation with something that can easily be avoided.

I did some testing to see how much of a difference IO alignment makes, and since the results are pretty significant, I would like to deal with this ASAP.

See results below;

So my questions are;

1. What is the best way to programatically go through all of the VM's and check for disk alignment - I don't want any manual process (if possible).
2. What are the options for aligning the misaligned disks?
3. What is the impact of each option (ie. How long does it take, Is Downtime required, etc.)
4. What are the limitations and / or known issues in doing such remediation tasks.

Thanks in advance,

Jon