Defragment to Optimise your VM Performance

Many system admins don’t realise just how much defragmentation and preventing fragmentation improves virtualisation performance. Clogged queues, poor disk latency, I/O congestion and sluggish virtual machines. These conditions occur when guest file systems are badly fragmented.

To improve I/O on virtual machines, VMware recommends:

"Defragment the file systems on the all the guests."

Find out more about VMware’s reccomandations for improved performance here.

How this happens?

Windows guest systems fragment files before anything is ever written to the disk.
If the Master File Table contains 100 logical addresses for a file then it will take 100 SCSI commands to access the file. The ideal number of SCSI commands per file is one (1).

The increased SCSI traffic causes a lot of unnecessary physical disk I/O in the SAN. This overload of disk I/O contributes the disk latency issues that often plagues virtualisation performance.

Raxco Software’s PerfectDisk offers defragmentation solutions for VMware and Hyper-V. Raxco are also a VMware Technology Alliance Partner.

The two main performance issues with virtualisation are LUN queue contention and disk latency; PerfectDisk eliminates both of these bottlenecks and keeps VMs running optimally.

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