Thin provisioning is a fairly hot topic in the storage arena, and with good reason. Many zones within the business and enterprise see massive benefit from the scalability of thin provisioning, and it can be a cost saver besides. However, the principle of thin provisioning suffers some unique maladies at both client and storage levels.

Some storage arrays include a feature permitting thin provisioning for their LUNs. This storage layer thin provisioning occurs below the virtual platform storage stack, and essentially means scalable datastores. Horizontal scaling of data stores adds a new tier of agility to the storage ecosystem that some businesses absolutely require.

LUN thin provisioning shouldn’t be confused with Virtual Disk TP, which works at a file level (not array). Thin provisioned VMs can expand based on pre-determined use cases, adding an extra degree of flexibility to storage density. Intelligently combining TP at multiple tiers yields some pretty neat capacity results.

Datastore thin provisioning has been the source of some concern for storage administrators with regards to recovery from over-provisioning. When virtual disks are deleted or copied away from a datastore, the array itself is not led to understand that those storage blocks are now free. You can see how this can lead to needless storage consumption.

vSphere 5 from VMware introduced a solution for this issue. The new vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) for TP uses the SCSI UNMAP command to tell the storage array that space previously occupied by a VM can be reclaimed. This addresses one aspect of the issue with thin VM growth.

Files are not simply being written to a virtual disk, they’re also deleted with regularity. Unfortunately, there is no associated feature within virtual platforms or Windows to inform the storage array that blocks can be recovered from a thin disk which should have contracted after deletions. Similar to the issue above, this leads to unnecessary storage waste.

With the release of V-locity 3 in 2011, we introduced a new Automatic Space Reclamation engine. This engine automatically zeroes out “dead” free space within thin virtual disks, without requiring that they be taken offline and with no impact on resource usage. So what does this mean? Thin VMs can be compacted, actually reclaiming the deleted space to the storage array for dynamic use elsewhere. The thin virtual disks themselves are kept slimmed down within datastores, giving more control back to the storage admins governing provisioning.

You can read more about VAAI for TP in vSphere 5 on the VMware blog here.

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Later this month (Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 12:00pm Eastern / 9:00am Pacific), IT Analyst David Chernicoff and I will co-host a webinar covering the benefits and caveats of defragmenting SAN attached servers.

Here is the abstract: 

As storage technologies have become more advanced there is a tendency for storage administrators to believe that the hardware is handling all of their data maintenance needs, keeping their files optimized in the best possible way for top performance and availability. The reality is that hardware solutions alone aren't the most efficient way to keep your critical data stored in an optimal fashion. With this webinar we will give you the information you need to understand how your data is actually being handled and what you can do to improve the performance and optimization of your Windows Server storage.

You can register here: www.windowsitpro.com/go/seminars/diskeeper/windows_san 

We also have two webinars planned for June on the topic of virtualization. One jointly with Redmond Mag, and the other with Microsoft. I'll post registration links on this blog when they are available. Lastly, we'll have a reprise of the SSD webinar we did with Microsoft sometime in July - this time we'll host and Microsoft will be our guest.

Sure I'd love to give a recommendation for Diskeeper.  We are running 2010 now with Diskeeper Administrator and so far I love the improvements. Many of our Lotus Domino servers were so busy that realtime defrag had trouble keeping up, but with the new IntelliWrite technology preventing most of the fragmentation in the first place, we finally have it under control.

 

The systems were running well prior to introducing Diskeeper, but we deployed the software during a project where we virtualized over 80% of our production servers.  Because of the shared storage aspect of our virtual platform I knew that fragmentation would become a serious issue if we didn't deal with it from day one.  The  Lotus Domino servers often had trouble keeping up with the fragmentation rate but most other servers did well with Diskeeper Server 2008.   

The new Diskeeper 2010 has our fragmentation in check across the boards and I couldn't be happier with it.

 

 

Josh Currier, Network Manager - Munters Americas

Amesbury, MA

http://www.muntersglobal.com

 

Munters is the  global leader in energy-efficient air treatment solutions and restoration services based on expertise within humidity and climate-control techniques.  Munters is organized in three divisions; Dehumidification, MCS (Moisture Control Serviced) and HumiCool. Customers are served in a wide range of segments, the most important being the insurance, utilities, food, pharma and electronics industries. Manufacturing and sales are carried out via the Group’s own companies in 30 countries. The Group has approx. 4000 employees and net sales of SEK 6,650 million.