The diagrams above, provided by Diskeeper, illustrate fragmentation-within fragmentation. The right image shows a fragmented Word file residing on a virtual disk, which, in turn, exists as a fragmented file on the host operating system.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — To maintain high performance levels, virtual environments require defragmenting even more than physical environments because they support multiple operating systems and create a higher intensity of disk activity, according to a new report co-authored by software developer Diskeeper (www.diskeeper.com).
According to a new white paper, “The Importance of Defragmentation in Virtual Environments”, co-authored by Osterman Research (www.ostermanresearch.com) and Diskeeper, fragmentation, which reduces system performance in a physical storage infrastructure, can create an even greater performance loss in a virtual storage infrastructure. Virtual disks can become fragmented over time just like the physical disk on which they reside, resulting is a fragmented virtual disk on a fragmented physical disk.
“The need for defragmentation is even more acute in virtual environments,” the report states. “This is because physical hardware in a virtualized storage environment must support more operating systems and so can undergo even more disk access and more stress than in a non-virtualized environment. Further, disk I/O in one virtual machine has a cascading effect on disk I/O in other virtual machines, and so the problem of excessive disk I/O in virtual machines is, in fact, even worse than what would be experienced in a physical disk environment.”
This research is significant, given that more organizations are seeking out virtualization solutions, which, in many cases, offer reduced hardware costs, the easy addition of capacity to existing infrastructure, simplified administration and maintenance, and easier migration from one server to another.
Because of the complexity of I/O traffic in virtual environments, simple defragmentation is not enough to fully address the fragmentation issue.
Solutions such as Diskeeper’s V-locity 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer provide technology to defragment virtual environments. According to Diskeeper, V-locity is the first optimization solution of its kind to eliminate the barriers to full virtual efficiency in both VMware and Hyper-V environments. Further, the “IntelliWrite” and “InvisiTasking” technologies employed by V-locity 2.0 prevent disks from getting fragmented in the first place, and efficiently coordinate VM resources when defrag is running in the background.
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