Improving a situation isn’t always about making change but rather what is done after that change has been made. A company can’t realistically expect that abandoning one method of operating their business for a new method will simply solve the existing problem, there has to be a level of accountability that follows the change. This is particularly true for companies who have moved from a multiple server environment to a virtualization infrastructure, a shift that can dramatically improve efficiency and productivity within a business yet it still requires more than just the implementation of new technology.
Companies have adopted virtualization for obvious reasons; it eliminates the costs of purchasing multiple servers, storing those servers and maintaining those servers as well as frees up time for IT admins to concentrate on innovation and development and generally improves the overall operability and flexibility of business. At least that’s what virtualization infrastructures are capable of doing; the key to ensuring these virtual platforms are able to sustain these benefits depends upon how well they are maintained by the company.
While virtualization platforms enable a company to place all of their operating systems and applications on a single physical machine which can then be accessed by a number of virtual computers that share the resources of that machine the process requires considerable work. What this means is that the demands placed upon a virtualization infrastructure can carry with them a significant weight, something that can affect the operation capabilities of that infrastructure.
This is easy to understand when you take a step back and look at what virtualization actually does, it condenses all of the information that had been spread across multiple servers and keeps it on one machine, that machine then facilitates the demands of a number of virtual computers, all of which can be trying to access that information at the same time. These demands can present a number of issues that are related to I/O bandwidth bottlenecks, virtual machine competition for shared I/O resources, and problems related to virtual disks that are set to dynamically grow do not resize when data is deleted- bringing back the issue of wasted free space.
When these issues occur a company finds themselves facing the same kind of problems that were encountered within their multiple server environments, essentially an inefficient and unproductive method of managing information. That’s not to say that virtualization infrastructures aren’t capable of being the solution that every company wants, it simply means once a company adopts a virtualization infrastructure they must guard its health and protect its performance capabilities.
Going back to the first paragraph, this is why what is done after the change has been made is so significant. Fortunately when it comes to virtualization infrastructures maintaining their integrity can b as easy as installing virtualization software, a kind of health insurance policy for their virtual platforms.
Companies like Diskeeper Corporation have introduced virtualization software that is capable of addressing problems that can affect the operability of virtualization infrastructures. For their part Diskeeper has designed their V-locity software as a virtual platform disk optimizer which effectively synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems in a virtualized environment.
V-locity effectively alleviates that ‘virtual’ disk bottleneck for virtual machines which in turn creates a faster and more efficient computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives without the need to add additional hardware. The virtualization software is also capable of coordinating resource usage so that the competition for shared I/O resources is better handled. V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating virtual disk “bloat,” this is the wasted disk space that occurs takes when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don’t then shrink when users or applications remove data. This is done through V-locity’s efforts in compacting the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.
Moving away from a multiple server environment and embracing the advancements afforded by virtualization infrastructures is certainly the path every company should take but it is imperative that once that technology is implemented it is protected; virtualization software like V-locity will ensure that your change is for the better.
