VMware still doesn't natively support bigger Advanced Format/512e disks, but the extended capacity is obviously mega-useful in backup repositories.
If I make use of AF disks in a repository, though my hardware RAID controllers will abstract a lot of the physical drive structure, Windows 2012r2 still sees the underlying physical size as 4k ("fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo %repositrydrive%" confirms Bytes Per Sector 512, Bytes Per Physical Sector 4096)
Question: How likely is this to significantly impact instant VM restore performances? I'm guessing that as W2012r2 (my repository/NFS host) is AF-aware, I won't run into any of the offset alignment issues that can cripple performance, but I would still potentially be impacted by the read-modify-write overhead if I modify a 512b block within a 4k sector? Where does this stand me in terms of VMware support - would an instant-restore NFS repository backed by AF drives technically be unsupported by them?
I've generally steered well clear of using anything AF/512e anywhere within an actual VMware production environment because of the lack of support from VMware's end so haven't really deviated from 'best practice' - anyone have experience of benchmarking AF stuff in a lab to see how much the performance knock is on the read-modify-write overhead? I realise to an extent it's linked to the IO profile of the workload, just keen for any anecdotes
Cheers