Good Morning Storage VM people,
I have a SQL DB who insists on occasionally doing a scheduled reboot to do a chkdsk on the NTFS filesystem within a VM. This takes a while and causes downtime of that VM, so I as a good infrastructure engineer am trying to think if this is really neccisary. A lot of times I find people do things simply because that's how they did them in the physical world and never stopped to think / had the in depth knowledge to think if it is beneficial in a virtual world.
My thinking is, the NTFS file system is written to a VMDK file sitting on a VMFS file system, that in turn sits on a storage array with its own file system. The array will take care of any bad sectors on the physical disks. VMFS will do its thing for the datastores and vmkfstools can fix any issues there. The NTFS filesystem is so far removed with so many layers of abstraction between it and physical disks, I question if the full check disk is required. Sure there can be issues with the NTFS file system that do not involve issues with the physical disks that chkdisk can look for and correct, but that is a subset of what the utility scans for.
Does anyone have an intelligent commentary on if a full chkdsk is beneficial for a VM using NTFS on a VMFS datastore that is stored on a sorage array? Or if there is an option that is a more efficient check for just NTFS issues that we might see in this situation?
Thanks.