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Virtualization and Disk Performance Whitepaper

Thursday, 04 May 2006 by Michel Roth

Diskeeper has put up a whitepaper about the rarely discussed pitfalls of server virtualization. A newly released Diskeeper whitepaper entitled, Virtualization and Disk Performance, details how the industry's movement towards virtualization is making the mechanical disk drive an even weaker link by consolidating I/O through this key performance bottleneck.

"With the recent explosion in storage capacity, the industry has begun to feel the growing disparity between high performing CPU and memory speeds and sluggish disk I/O. Server virtualization exacerbates this bottleneck by layering host and virtual file systems, creating layers of file fragmentation within fragmentation, and funneling I/O requests through common I/O channels. Diskeeper's new whitepaper discusses the many ways virtualization ties server throughput more closely to the lagging disk I/O speeds.

With disk fragmentation being a major contributor to decreased file system performance, automatic defragmentation should be a key piece in any virtualization strategy. In today's environment, it's important to defragment drives more frequently, ideally daily. Daily defragmentation handles fragmentation as it occurs and reduces the resources needed for each defragmentation job".

Read the whitepaper here. (pdf)