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In general, partitions (and partition tables) are not required for volumes other than the boot volume or for applications with very specific requirements. Dell Technologies recommends using the whole volume instead of partitioning the volume wherever possible. This eases future volume expansion and reduces administration overhead for maintaining the partitions.
If partitioning is required, it is recommended to align the partition on the 1 MB boundary. ME4 Series storage uses internal disk pool chunk sizes ranging from 64k to 512k. The 1 MB boundary works well because it is a multiple of the chunk size. Misalignment can result in extra I/Os to the volumes and degrades overall performance. Use either fdisk or parted to create the partition. However, only parted can create partitions larger than 2 TB. The parted method is described as follows.
# parted /dev/mapper/mpathb mklabel gpt
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/mapper/mpathb will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? Yes
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.
# parted -a opt /dev/mapper/mpathb mkpart primary 2048s 100%
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.
# parted /dev/mapper/mpathb align-check opt 1
1 aligned