Every company is trying to find a way to gain an
advantage on their competitors. Hours are spent every year analyzing how
to streamline business operations and improve the general efficiency of
the company. Many advantages come from improvements in technology and
how quickly companies adopt them. The adoption of virtualization
platforms as a core business management system is rapidly increasing as
companies realize the added value they bring.
Virtualization systems operate differently from multiple server
environments. In a multiple server environment a company puts operating
systems and applications on different servers to make sure that they are
properly stored and protected. Each of these servers requires a lot of
care to keep running smoothly. IT administrators must update, back up,
archive and maintain each server individually. This gets repetitive and
does not use the IT admins time efficiently. As the network gets larger
and more servers are added, expenses grow as well.
With a virtualization platform all the information that a company needs
to store can be condensed onto one server. The new platform increases IT
network efficiency and lowers operating costs by only requiring a
single machine to store information. The information can then be
accessed by different virtual machines that share the resources of the
server. Compiling the information allows IT admins to spend less time
focusing on maintenance and causes less free space to be wasted on the
server.
When using virtualization platforms there are several obstacles to
overcome. I/O bandwidth bottlenecks faster because of accelerated
fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machine competition for
shared I/O resources is not effectively prioritized across the platform,
and virtual disks set to dynamically grow don't resize when data are
deleted. These issues can all arise and cause problems with a
virtualization infrastructure.
These problems are common but they are easy to prevent. A company simply
has to install a
virtualization platform disk optimizer. This software,
like V-locity from
Diskeeper Corporation, works on the virtualization
platform to make sure that it reaches its peak performance. V-locity is
designed with exclusive features to make it the most effective way to
optimize a virtualization platform.
With V-locity the IntelliWrite
(R) Technology writes much larger
sequential disk I/Os from Windows virtual machines for better overall
performance. It also creates less work for the copy-on-write technology
that copies/tracks every write. The InvisiTasking
(R) Technology
operates invisibly behind the scenes to optimize all windows operating
systems. Working in the background ensures that V-locity won't cut
across the production needs of other virtual machines.
For systems with special virtual disk types V-locity uses Virtual Disk
Intelligence to cater to the way that the special disks operate. The
special disks operate faster, more efficient and reach peak performance
for the users.
V-locity also takes care of systems with Thin/Dynamic disks. These disks
can waste free space because while they are set to resize they are only
ever capable of growing. They never shrink and the data that are
deleted from these disks are no longer used by the computer. This
creates a space "hole" that will never be filled on its own. With
Virtual Disk Compaction V-locity provides a way to deal with these space
"holes" and allow the free space to be used again. A graphical user
interface displays how much space can be compacted and then provides an
easy one-click way to begin the compaction process.
Using a virtualization platform to gain an edge in an industry is a
smart decision but only works if you take the proper steps to protect
the new infrastructure. Using V-locity a company can be sure that their
virtual servers are getting the maximum I/O performance possible and the
entire system is operating efficiently.
