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Neither ScaleIO nor ASM require volumes to be partitioned, but many system administrators and database administrations prefer to create partitions as this clearly informs the system administrator that the device is in use. Either approach is valid.
The optional ASMLib package requires a partition offset on a device before it can be stamped for ASM, but ASMLib is not recommended for use with ScaleIO (see ASMLib note later in this section).
For Red Hat Linux 7 and later the offset of partition is automatically set to 1 MB for devices larger than 4 GB. For older Linux systems, the default offset is 31.5 KB. This older offset can lead to degraded I/O performance. To avoid this alignment problem, Dell EMC recommends setting the partition offset to at least 1 MB.
The following example shows a partition being created on Linux with a 1MB (2048 sector) offset.
[root@localhost ~]# parted /dev/scinia mklabel gpt ; parted /dev/scinia mkpart primary 2048s 100%
Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary