We’ve just returned from the Interop Expo in New York, and what a show! The recent release of V-locity® 3 was extremely well received and interest in its innovations was very high. The Diskeeper Corporation booth was constantly attended by groups of CIOs and storage administrators eager to hear about the benefits of the new virtual platform optimizer.

The lion’s share of energy and buzz at the show surrounded virtualization and cloud computing. Leading vendors across these markets as well as storage, networking, and information security exhibited for large groups of virtual admins and IT executives. Shows like Interop are critical for decision makers to stay apprised of the ever-evolving IT infrastructure landscape, and excellent opportunities to get educated about what is truly needed to grow and maintain a virtual environment that runs on all engines for them.

In addition to being asked by numerous IT analysts about the innovations underlying the incredible advantages of V-locity 3, I was interviewed by TMC (Technology Marketing Corporation) about it.

The need to meet higher Service Level Agreements and reduce Total Cost of Ownership for shared storage have reached a new plateau in virtualized networks and private clouds—what V-locity 3 does best.

If you’re reading this and you were at the event, we’d love to hear about your experiences at Interop this year.

Diskeeper Corporation will be exhibiting at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, FL next week. If you’re planning on attending this IT Expo, stop by the booth to hear firsthand about how V-locity 3 is improving virtual systems in a whole new way.

Cures Pains from I/O Bottlenecks, Slow VMs, Slow Migration, Resource Conflicts, 

Wasted Storage Space and Slow Backup Speeds

Diskeeper Corporation announced at VMworld the release of new V-locity^® 3 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware^®. 

V-locity 3 delivers invisible background optimization to give maximum I/O performance on virtual servers. 

V-locity 3 now has full integration with VMware ESXi as well as existing support for other platforms such as ESX, and Microsoft Hyper-V™. Other developments include V-Aware™ technology which detects external resource usage from other virtual machines on the virtual platform and eliminates resource contention that would otherwise exist on the same Host Server. New CogniSAN™ technology detects external resource usage within a shared storage system, such as a SAN, and allows for transparent optimization by never competing for resources utilized by other VMs over the same storage infrastructure. CogniSAN does this without intruding in any way into SAN-layer operations. Lastly is the new automatic zeroing of free space which is a powerful engine that zeros out unused data blocks on virtual disks and makes virtual disk compaction easy.

http://www.diskeeper.com/press/releases/releases.aspx?F=2011083001.htm

A major concern with virtual guest operating systems in a virtualized environment is the possible resource contention introduced as each virtual guest operates independent of the others.

With respect to storage, Diskeeper Corporation’s V-locity 3.0 virtual platform disk optimizer mitigates over-utilization in two ways:

First, each V-locity Guest installation coordinates resource scheduling with a centrally installed V-locity Host Agent.  These guests automatically discover the V-locity Host Agent following installation. Once connected together in this fashion, V-locity Guests cooperate to complete each of their defragmentation tasks in a manner most efficient to the virtual server's resources as a whole.  

Second, the automatic zeroing of free space feature ensures that unused space on virtual drives is zeroed out and compacted in such a way that when a virtual guest is migrated to a different virtual server via VMotion, only the allocated data is transferred.  This speeds up the VMotion process and decreases the load on the shared storage subsystem.

RainWorx specializes in Online Auction Software.  Our hosted web sites are mostly our Auction Software customers.  As such, every auction listing (for each customer, on each server) has one or more images associated, so we have a very high volume of images being uploaded which could potentially create a lot of fragmentation.

Bill Moller

RainWorx

Overview 

The intensified demand for IT network efficiency and lower operating costs has been driving the phenomenal growth of virtualization in the past decade, with no signs of slowing. At present, many corporations run more virtualized servers than physical servers.

 

While virtualization provides opportunity for consolidation and better hardware utilization, it’s critically important to recognize and never exceed hardware capacities.  

The importance of ensuring sufficient CPU and memory are well understood, with many processes and management tools available to help plan and properly provision VMs for these critical resources. I/O traffic, network and disk, are more complicated to account for in virtual environments as they tend to be more unpredictable.

In order to better accommodate disk I/O, most virtualization platforms will implement a Storage Area Network (SAN) which can offer greater data throughput, and a dynamic environment to address fluctuations in I/O demands.

While a storage infrastructure can be built out to meet expected demands, there are uncontrollable behaviors that will still impede performance. 

File Fragmentation

As files are written to a general purpose local disk file systems, such as Windows NTFS, a natural byproduct is file fragmentation. File fragmentation is a state in which the data stream of a file is stored in non-contiguous clusters in the file system. Fragmentation occurs on logical volume, and by device drivers is translated to logical blocks, and eventually to physical sectors residing on a storage device. It can be demonstrated as pieces of a file located in a non-contiguous manner. The effect of this file fragmentation is increased I/O overhead, leading to slower system performance for the operating system.

In the case of virtual platforms, a guest operating systems is stored as a file (i.e. set of files) on the virtual platforms file system as a “virtual disk”. A virtual disk is essentially a container file, housing all the files that constitute the OS and user data of a VM.  A virtual disk files can fragment just as any other file can resulting in what amounts to a “logically” fragmented virtual hard disk, which still has typical file fragmentation contained within it. The picture represented to the right would appear as “VirtualServer1.vmdk, 30GB in size, in 4 pieces”.  

 

This situation equates to hierarchical fragmentation or more simply fragmentation-within-fragmentation. Given the relatively static nature and large size of virtual disks, and large allocation unit size of VMFS (typically 1MB), fragmentation of these files is unlikely to cause performance issues in most cases. The focus and solution to fragmentation should be directed at the guest operating system.

Fragmentation within a Windows VM will cause Windows to generate additional unnecessary I/O. This added I/O traffic can be discovered using Windows Performance Monitor, where it is one of the principal causes for Split I/O.  

 

Fragmentation prevention and defragmentation technologies exist to eliminate unnecessary I/O overhead, and improve system performance. Fragmentation prevention solves fragmentation at the source, by actively causing files to be written contiguously via advanced files system drivers. Defragmentation is the action in which file fragments are re-aligned within the file system, into a single extent, so that only the minimal amount of disk I/Os are required to access the file, thereby increasing access speed.  

Partition Alignment 

Depending on your storage protocol and virtual disk type, misaligned partitions can cause additional unnecessary I/O[1]. In the example below in which the ESX and SAN volumes are not properly aligned, a Word file spanning four NTFS clusters causes additional unnecessary I/O in both VMFS and the SAN LUN.  

 

Similarities between Partition Alignment and Fragmentation 

Much like misaligned partitions can cause additional I/O at multiple layers, so does fragmentation. While partitions can be properly aligned once and never require further corrective action, fragmentation will continue to occur, and needs to be regularly addressed.

In the example below, which assume proper partition alignment, a file in eight fragments in the guest OS, causes additional I/Os to be generated at the virtualization platform layer[2] and at the LUN.   

 

Defragmentation in the guest operating system (of this file), eliminates excess I/O when accessing the file as Windows only generates one I/O. This reduction in I/O traffic translates to the host file system and SAN LUN, ensuring efficiencies at each layer.   

 

Best Practices 

Defragmentation of Windows file systems is a VMware recommended performance solution. The VMware Knowledge Base article 1004004[3] states “Defragmenting a disk is required to address problems encountered with an operating system as a result of file system fragmentation. Fragmentation problems result in slow operating system performance.” In order to validate the Vmware statement, tests were performed.

 

Test Environment

  

Configuration

Test Environment Configuration Host OS: ESX Server 4.1 with VMFS (1MB blocks)

Guest OS: Windows Server 2008r2 x64 (3GB RAM, 1 vCPU)

Benchmarking Software: Iometer (http://www.iometer.org/)

Fragmentation Program: FragmentFile.exe (used to fragment a specified file)

Defragmentation Software: V-locity® 3.0 (http://www.diskeeper.com/business/v-locity/)

 

Storage: 10GB test volume in a 40GB virtual disk. VMFS Datastore of 410GB. HP Smart Array P400 controller. RAID 5 (4x 136GB SCSI at 10K RPM) Stripe size of 64KB with a 64KB offset (properly aligned).

Load Generation 

The industry standard benchmarking tool Iometer was used to generate I/O load for these experiments.  

Iometer configuration options used as variables in these experiments:

• Transfer request sizes: 1KB, 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB, 64KB, 72KB, and 128KB

• Percent random or sequential distribution: for each transfer request size, 0 percent and 100 percent random accesses were selected

• Percent read or write distribution: for each transfer request size, 0 percent and 100 percent read accesses were selected 

Iometer parameters that were held constant for all tests:

• Size of volume: 10GB

• Size of Iometer test file (iobw.tst): 8,131,204 KB (~7.75GB)

• Number of outstanding I/O operations: 16

• Runtime: 4 minutes

• Ramp-up time: 60 seconds

• Number of workers to spawn automatically: 1 

The following is excerpted from a VMware white paper[4], and helps to explain why the Iometer parameters were used. 

Servers typically run a mix of workloads consisting of different access patterns and I/O data sizes.

Within a workload there may be several data transfer sizes and more than one access pattern.There are a few applications in which access is either purely sequential or purely random. For example, database logs are written sequentially. Reading this data back during database recovery is done by means of a sequential read operation. Typically, online transaction processing (OLTP) database access is predominantly random in nature. 

The size of the data transfer depends on the application and is often a range rather than a single value. For Microsoft Exchange, the I/O size is generally small (from 4KB to 16KB), Microsoft SQL Server database random read and write accesses are 8KB, Oracle accesses are typically 8KB, and Lotus Domino uses 4KB. On the Windows platform, the I/O transfer size of an application can be determined using Perfmon.

In summary, I/O characteristics of a workload are defined in terms of the ratio of read operations to write operations, the ratio of sequential accesses to random accesses, and the data transfer size. Often, a range of data transfer sizes may be specified instead of a single value.  

Create Fragmentation 

The FragmentFile.exe tool was used to fragment the Iometer test file (iobw.tst) into 568,572 fragments, a mid-range amount of fragmentation for a production server. The statistics collected from an analysis of the volume (shown below) were performed with V-locity.

Test Procedure 

The primary objective was to characterize the performance of fragmented versus defragmented virtual machines for a range of data sizes across a variety of access patterns. The data sizes selected were 1KB, 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB, 64KB, 72KB, and 128KB. The access patterns were restricted to a combination of 100 percent read or write and 100 percent random or sequential. Each of these four workloads was tested for eight data sizes, for a total of 32 data points per workload.

In order to isolate the impact of fragmentation only the test VM was powered on and active for the duration of the tests.

For the initial run, Iometer created a non-fragmented file, and performance data was collected. Then FragmentFile.exe tool was used to fragment the Iometer test file, the VM rebooted, and the test procedure re-run. This resulted in data sets for both non-fragmented and fragmented scenarios. The results are graphed below.  

Performance Results  

As the graphs show, all workloads show an increase in throughput when the volume [file] is defragmented (i.e. not fragmented).  It also becomes clear that as the I/O read/write size increases, the fragmentation-induced I/O latency increases dramatically.  The greatest improvements of a contiguous file are found with file reads; both random and sequential. 

 

Random Reads  

 

Random Writes 

Sequential Reads

Sequential Writes

Conclusion

 

Fragmentation demonstratively impedes performance of Windows guest operating systems.  While the tests depicted were executed on a singular VM, the issue becomes exponentially worse in a multi-VM environment wherein each VM suffers from file fragmentation.  As server virtualization establishes a symbiotic relationship, it is important to remember that generating disk I/O in one virtual machine affects I/O requests from other virtual systems.  Therefore latencies in one VM will artificially inflate latency in co-located virtual machines (VMs that share a common platform).  

Fragmentation artificially inflates the amount of disk I/O requests which, on a virtual machine platform, compounds the disk bottleneck even more so than on conventional systems.

Eliminating fragmentation in VMs, and the corresponding unnecessary disk I/O traffic, is vital to platform-wide performance and enhances the ability to host more VMs on a shared infrastructure.

              

Coming Soon: V-locity 3.0 (virtual platform optimizer)  has some fantastic new features in it we're sure you’ll like, including:

+Full Support for ESXi Server (in addition to existing support for ESX and Hyper-V)

+Reduced installation effort for ESX Servers (no installation on Host)

+New CogniSAN technology (for storage area networks)

+New V-Aware technology (for any virtualization platform)

+Automatic zeroing of free space (for thin/dynamic virtual disks)

+Added support for virtualization platforms such as XenServer, RHEV, Oracle VM and more

We are just a few short weeks from releasing it, and could use your help. If your interested in catching a “sneak peak” (our final release candidate build), and are interested and able to install, evaluate and then comment (fill out a 10 minute online survey) on this software, simply fill-out a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) located here.

Jeremy Buck, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation, in this series on "How to Speed up your Business Computers," continues his discussion on virtualization, talking about why you need a program like V-locity ^®, virtual platform disk optimizer, to keep your virtual computers running at peak performance.

The full release is located here.

Let's Talk Computers ranks as one of the longest-running computer radio talk shows and can be heard weekly in 7 states and 24 hours a day on the website.

Diskeeper (data performance for physical systems) and V-locity (optimization for virtual systems) are designed to deliver performance, reliability, longer life and energy savings. Increased performance and saved energy from our software are relatively easy to empirically test and validate. Longer life is a matter of minimizing wear and tear on hard drives (MTTF) and providing an all around better experience for users so they can continue to be productive with aging equipment (rather than frequent hardware refreshes).

Reliability is far more difficult to pinpoint as the variables involved are difficult, if not impossible, to isolate in test cases. We have overwhelming anecdotal evidence from customers in surveys, studies, and success stories that application hangs, freezes, crashes, and the sort are all remedied or reduced with Diskeeper and/or V-locity.

However, there is a reliability "hard ceiling" in the NTFS file system; a point in which fragmentation/file attributes become so numerous reliability is jeopardized. In NTFS, files that hit the proverbial "fan", and spray out into hundreds of thousands and millions of fragments, result in a mess that is well... stinky.

In short, fragmentation can become so severe that it ultimately ends up in data loss/corruption. A Microsoft Knowledge Base article describes this phenomenon. I've posted it below for reference:

A heavily fragmented file in an NTFS file system volume may not grow beyond a certain size caused by an implementation limit in structures that are used to describe the allocations.

In this scenario, you may experience one of the following issues:

When you try to copy a file to a new location, you receive the following error message:
In Windows Vista or in later versions of Windows
The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation
In versions of Windows that are earlier than Windows Vista
insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service
When you try to write to a sparse file from the Application log, Microsoft SQL Server may log an event that resembles the following:
In Windows Vista or in later versions of Windows
Event Type: Information
Event Source: MSSQLSERVER

Description: ...
665(The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation.) to SQL Server during write at 0x000024c8190000, in filename...
In versions of Windows that are earlier than Windows Vista
Event Type: Information
Event Source: MSSQLSERVER

Description: ...
1450(Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service.) to SQL Server during write at 0x000024c8190000, in file with handle 0000000000000FE8 ...
When a file is very fragmented, NTFS uses more space to save the description of the allocations that is associated with the fragments. The allocation information is stored in one or more file records. When the allocation information is stored in multiple file records, another structure, known as the ATTRIBUTE_LIST, stores information about those file records. The number of ATTRIBUTE_LIST_ENTRY structures that the file can have is limited.

We cannot give an exact file size limit for a compressed or a highly fragmented file. An estimate would depend on using certain average sizes to describe the structures. These, in turn, determine how many structures fit in other structures. If the level of fragmentation is high, the limit is reached earlier. When this limit is reached, you receive the following error message:

Windows Vista or later versions of Windows:
STATUS_FILE_SYSTEM_LIMITATION The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation

Versions of Windows that are earlier than Windows Vista:
STATUS_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service

Compressed files are more likely to reach the limit because of the way the files are stored on disk. Compressed files require more extents to describe their layout. Also, decompressing and compressing a file increases fragmentation significantly. The limit can be reached when write operations occur to an already compressed chunk location. The limit can also be reached by a sparse file. This size limit is usually between 40 gigabytes (GB) and 90 GB for a very fragmented file.  

WORKAROUND
For files that are not compressed or sparse, the problem can be lessened by running Disk Defragmenter. Running Disk Defragmenter will not resolve this problem for compressed or sparse files.

One of the most significant features in Windows 2008R2 (for Hyper-V) is Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) for virtual disks (vhd). This allows NTFS to behave similar to a clustered file system, addressing many limitations found in Hyper-V storage with the original release (Windows 2008).  

IntelliWrite is “DKRtWrt” (its code names in development stages was WriteRight and then later RightWrite -hence "RtWrt"). To see or load/unload filter drivers, use the Filter Manager Control Program (fltmc):

"Spokane Regional Health District uses CommVault Simpana backup/archiving/disaster recovery software installed on a dedicated server with 37TB of SAS attached storage.

                                                                                       

We perform daily full and incremental backups of all our servers. The data backup is disk-to-disk-to-tape and is deduplicated as it is saved on the SAS storage. The deduplication process can create a very large number of file fragments, sometimes over 1,540,000 fragments on a 2TB disk array. With Diskeeper EnterpriseServer automatic defrag running the response time of the arrays is approaching 0.02 second delay due to fragmentation. This has reduced our backup time by approximately 25 percent for any D2D2T job. 

SRHD also uses Microsoft Hyper-V and currently has 31 virtualized servers running on an Intel Modular Server. There are 72TB of storage available to the Modular Server via SAS connections featuring dual path IO. All of the data on the SAS arrays is maintained in RAID 60 logical disk drives. Since setting up V-locity, which has built-in support for VHD (virtual hard disks), with automatic defragmentation, our VHDs very seldom show any fragmentation. 

                                                         

The solutions also have the intelligence to monitor disk IO and the defragmentation will pause to prevent IO latency affecting performance. They are set and forget applications which perform a very well without impact on our server response times."

-Larry Smith, Spokane Regional Health District

Joe Marion is founder and Principal of Healthcare Integration Strategies, specializing in the integration of imaging technologies with the overall healthcare IT landscape. His blog (at Healthcare Informatics) covers challenges and opportunities specifically relevant to optimizing Healthcare IT initiatives.

Medical images are a significant percentage of the the world's storage requirements, and have been predicted to encompass an even greater percentage of future storage demand. In Joe's recent blog post he posed the question "Is Defragmentation a Boon to Healthcare IT Performance?"

In his post he includes personal observations and insight into performance implications fragmentation can incur on IT as healthcare departments themselves consolidate and standardize application use:

"With departmental solutions, there very likely was less emphasis on system tools such as defragmentation applications.  Now that PACS technology is becoming more intertwined with the rest of IT, there should be greater emphasis on inclusion of these tools.  In addition, server virtualization can mean that previously independent applications are now part of a virtual server farm."

He also makes the astute observation that centralizing computing and storage magnifies bottlenecks, making a solution such as defragmentation increasingly more vital:

"The addition of disk-intensive applications such as speech recognition and imaging could potentially impact the overall performance of these applications.  As data storage requirements within healthcare grow, the problem will potentially get worse.  Think of the consequence of managing multiple 3000-slice CT studies and performing multiple 3D analyses.  As more advanced visualization applications go the client-server route, the performance of a central server doing the 3D processing could be significantly impacted."

You can read Joe's blog here.

  

I had a test run here internally in order to make a point about what does, or more specifically "does not", happen when you VMotion/SVMotion a Windows Guest OS (GOS). We wanted to demonstrate that, while VMware is copying the VM to another host/storage, it does nothing about the internal fragmentation of files in Windows.

We felt this was a valuable demonstration as one of the old (1980s) ways to "fix" fragmentation was to copy off the files/backup, reformat the volume, and then copy back/restore. This offered a degree of success, but required taking the data offline in order to get rid of most of the fragmentation. On a side note, backing up/copying fragmented files takes a lot longer than it would on contiguous and ordered files.

Anyway, S/VMotion is such a cool feature because it works on live VMs. So, if the VMDK movement somehow did align/reorder files in Windows, it could be a great solution to Windows file system fragmentation! So here's how we tested...

1. Setup 2 ESX 4.1 Servers with iSCSI storage and vCenter with SVMotion capability.

2. Create a VM with Windows 7 in one of the ESX Server storage (Ex: Storage1) and a 20 GB Thin virtual disk.

3. Using an internal tool, create moderate fragmentation on the virtual disk (80k fragments, average fragments per file around 3.0, around 50% free space).

4. Install V-locity with all features (e.g. defrag, IntelliWrite, etc...) disabled. This is just so we can run a fragmentation analysis and save the reports.

5. Save the "Before SVMotion" analysis report, and then stop V-locity Windows Service (to make sure it is entirely inactive).

6. Using SVMotion move the live VM to the other ESX Server storage (Ex: Storage2).

7. Once the move is completed, restart the V-locity Windows Service and perform a post "After SVMotion" analysis.

8. Save this job report.

We saw what we expected, given VMotion leverages Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology and is block, not file based. I attached the report, so you can see the side-by-side analysis data, files in Windows are not defragmented in an SVMotion. Now, that's not to say possible fragmentation of the VMDK files themsleves (on VMFS datastores) was not affected, but that's a topic for another post. 

As a long term VMware Premier Technology Alliance Partner, we're excited to now announce that V-locity has, after passing stringent testing, been certified by VMware as VMware Ready. V-locity is the first and only certified solution for virtual disk I/O optimization. 

You can see the product listed at VMware's site here.

  

Diskeeper Corporation, innovators in performance and reliability technologies^®, today announced that it is going to be presenting its V-locity™ 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer solution at Interop New York 2010.  

Location: Interop New York 2010

Date:  October 20^th and 21st, 2010

Booth: 725

Venue: Javits Convention Center, New York, New York 

Key to seminars and discussions at Interop New York will be Virtualization. Virtualization is being rapidly adopted because it can lower the cost and increase the flexibility of IT infrastructure.  A new white paper, The Importance of Defragmentation in Virtual Environments, co-authored by Osterman Research and Diskeeper Corporation, demonstrates that virtual environments require defragmenting even more than physical environments. This is due to the fact that virtual environments support multiple operating systems and create a higher intensity of disk activity.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101020006635/en

Early in 2011 we'll have a new release of V-locity that will enhance support for virtualization platforms, including those from Citrix, Oracle, and more. While V-locity 2.0 is in use on Windows guests running on these platforms today (and we do recommend it over using Diskeeper), this release will also provide our revolutionary InvisiTasking technology to ensure invisible optimization of guest disk I/O traffic without the need to schedule maintenance tasks.

If you are interested in field testing, we expect to begin in the next couple of months.

A new white paper, The Importance of Defragmentation in Virtual Environments, co-authored by Osterman Research and Diskeeper Corporation, demonstrates that virtual environments require defragmenting even more than physical environments. This is due to the fact that virtual environments support multiple operating systems and create a higher intensity of disk activity. 

“The need for defragmentation is even more acute in virtual environments,” the white paper 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.” 

The white paper indicates that fragmentation, which reduces system performance in a physical storage infrastructure, can even create more of a performance loss in a virtual storage infrastructure. Virtual disks can become fragmented over time just like the physical disk or disks on which they reside. The result is a fragmented virtual disk on a fragmented physical disk—or fragmentation within fragmentation.  This data is especially important in light of the rapid growth of virtual environments. Organizations are particularly interested in virtualization due to its many benefits, which include reduced hardware costs, ease of adding additional capacity to existing infrastructure, ease of administration and maintenance, and simplified 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. For that reason, Diskeeper Corporation has developed new technology for virtual environments, found in their V-locity™ 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer. A recent product release for VMware and Hyper-V, V-locity 2.0 is the first optimizer that truly eliminates the barriers to full virtual efficiency. V-locity 2.0  employs IntelliWrite™ and InvisiTasking® technologies to both prevent a majority of fragmentation in the first place and to efficiently coordinate VM resources when defrag is running invisibly in the background. The complete white paper is located here.

Diskeeper Corporation is glad to announce exhibiting at the upcoming Interop New York show, "The Leading Business Technology Event". 

The show is October 20th and 21st at the Javits Center.  Come by and see us at booth 725. We will have free trialware of Diskeeper 2010 performance software, V-locity 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer, and Undelete 2009 real time data protection software.

We have a new update available for V-locity 2.0 users. Here is a list of fixes and features we added:

Fixed several 508 compliance issues in the UI.

Fixed a communication error message in the UI.

Fixed a problem with VMware host service start.

Fixed a synchronization problem in environments with a very large number of physical disks.

Fixed a Guest/Host synchronization problem with ESX Server 4.1 (GOS with V-locity Guest did not appear in Host UI).

Fixed several crashes in the debug build of the Windows service.

Added Group Policy support.

 

Added SCOM support. A SCOM Management Pack for V-locity is included with a license of Diskeeper Administrator.

BURBANK, CA -- 07/20/10 -- Diskeeper Corporation has officially shipped V-locity™ 2.0, a new virtual platform disk optimizer designed to deliver invisible background optimization of all Windows® Guest operating systems running on the VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms. New to V-locity 2.0, is the addition of the breakthrough IntelliWrite™ fragmentation prevention technology originally introduced with Diskeeper 2010. Utilizing IntelliWrite technology, V-locity writes files to the disk to prevent up to 85 percent of fragmentation from occurring before it even happens.

Already a VMware and Microsoft partner for its Diskeeper® performance software, V-locity was made to create a virtual-specific product that not only performs defragmentation functions, but also synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems in a virtualized environment.

As virtualization platforms begin to age, fragmentation of files in Windows host and guest operating systems generates more disk I/O than should be necessary. Fragmentation creates more overhead on the OS and file system. While CPU, Network, and memory resources may allow for greater VM density, the disk subsystem can become a virtualization "high" hurdle.

"Fragmentation clogged disk subsystems can lead to an inability to run more VMs on given hardware infrastructure, and lead to disk performance bottlenecks for VMs that share a common storage subsystem," notes Diskeeper Product Manager, Michael Materie. "V-locity is designed to alleviate the 'virtual' disk bottleneck for VMs and provide a faster and more efficient computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives, without having to add more hardware."

"First of all, when building out my environment I make sure to have fast hard drives, controllers, etc., in order to make sure not to suffer bottlenecks. In addition, I am very careful about not over-committing resources. However, I was shocked to see, after deploying V-locity, how much performance increased on the servers I had hosting disk-intensive operations. This includes our database server, our Exchange server, and to a certain extent, two terminal servers," stated Bill Philpot Manager of Information Technology at Mesa Industries, Inc.

Diskeeper Corporation's proprietary technology, IntelliWrite writes files in a non-fragmented condition. Copy on write solutions (e.g. as used by Snapshots) take action on changes to data at a block level. Moving data, as is done in a defragmentation job to consolidate file fragments in a logical file system, can trigger copy on write solutions to take extra actions such as using more storage capacity, unnecessarily. Writing a file contiguously eliminates the need to defragment it after it has been created.

InvisiTasking® technology, another Diskeeper Corporation proprietary technology, is specifically engineered to allow "background" applications to operate with zero impact/overhead on a system. With V-locity 2, the InvisiTasking technology has been "enlightened" to operate across a virtual platform. Even as more VMs are added to a host platform or dynamically migrated to new hosts (e.g. vMotion, Live Migration), the enlightened InvisiTasking will continue to dynamically adjust to changing environments, providing V-locity 2.0 users with "Set It and Forget It" ® optimization of their virtual disk platforms.

V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating virtual disk "bloat." This is the wasted disk space that takes place when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don't then shrink when users or applications remove data. V-locity actually compacts the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT Managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

V-locity has four unique solution sets:

• InvisiTasking - coordinates resource usage to ensure defrag is 100% invisible
  
  
• IntelliWrite - prevent fragmentation and offer 100% compatibility in all environments
  
  
• Virtual Disk Intelligence - automatically detects and configures based on virtual disk type
  
  
• Virtual Disk Compaction - shrinks/compacts virtual disks that are set to grow-as-needed

V-locity consists of three components:

• V-locity Host installed in the VMware ESX Host or Windows Server 2008/R2 operating system running Hyper-V.
  
  
• V-locity Guest installed in all Windows virtual machines.
  
  
• For VMware ESX platforms: V-locity includes a small application that allows you to remotely connect from your Windows desktop to the V-locity Host component on an ESX system.

Note: On Windows platforms, each component will optimize its respective OS; performing defragmentation of files and consolidation of free space. This minimizes unnecessary I/O passed from the OS to the disk subsystem and aligns data on the drives for optimal access.

Optimizing the disks of virtual platforms is an absolute must for performance. Typically even more so than on physical platforms.

Topix Technologies, an IT Analyst group out of Paris, France recent completed a study about the effects of fragmentation on the modern virtual infrastructure. They used V-locity to restore performance to the high service levels IT departments and providers are required to deliver. Check out the performance results in the chart below or read the full report here.

 

I am enjoying V-locity. It has made a difference in performance, especially with some of my virtual machines.

One major feature I like is the built-in functionality to compact the VHD files. My hard drive was running low on space, but I knew my virtual machines weren’t using that much and V-locity told me which virtual hard drives to compact. I did that and it freed up a lot of space.  

We are running NextGen HER (Electronic Medical Records ) which generates hundreds of files daily, but we don’t have to worry because every night V-locity puts them in their place! The speed of our virtual guests and hosts and increased dramatically as well as our biggest file server that serves 170 users.  I also like how unobtrusive V-locity is… I don’t even notice that it is there really. I am excited to see Diskeeper [Corporation] on the cutting edge! 

Chris G., System Administrator, Northwest Human Services