It is important for companies to streamline their
operations so that they can work as efficiently as possible and not
spend any money in wasteful ways. This has lead many companies to begin
using virtualization networks because of the increased IT network
efficiency and the lower operating costs available on virtual platforms.
Virtualization networks provide companies with an alternative to the
multiple server environments. Companies using multiple server
environments have become conditioned to ignore the waste and
inefficiencies created by spreading information around the different
servers. When a company uses a multiple server environment they store
operating systems and applications on different physical servers. This
creates two different kinds of waste.
The first kind of waste is the time of the IT administrators and people
who must keep the servers running correctly. Having to maintain, back
up, archive and update each server individually is time consuming and
leaves the IT admins unable to focus their time and skills in other ways
that can benefit the company.
The second kind of waste is space. With each server housing a single
operating system or application the rest of the space on the server can
go unused. Additional applications and operating systems are not added
to this free space but are placed on new machines creating additional
wasted space and creating more work for the IT admins who are already
bogged down with other maintenance issues. There are also the expenses
tied to purchasing and storing additional servers.
Virtualization platforms allow companies to condense their information
on one server. Each application and operating system is stored in its
own secure area on the single server and can be accessed by different
virtual machines. This allows companies to maximize the space available
on the server. Because data is stored in separate secure areas if a
problem occurs in one area the other will remain unaffected and the data
uncorrupted.
Once a company has decided to switch to virtual platform it must make
sure that the platform is protected from threats that will cause it to
slow down and lose efficiency. There are three main threats to
virtualization platforms, I/O bandwidth bottlenecks quickly due to
accelerated fragmentation, virtual machine competition for shared I/O
resources is not effectively prioritized across the platform, and
virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not resize when data are
deleted resulting in wasted space.
Virtual platform disk optimizers,
like V-locity from
Diskeeper Corporation, are designed to prevent
problems from occurring and create the most efficient platform possible.
V-locity uses four unique features to optimize the entire virtual
platform and provide maximum I/O performance on virtual servers. The
IntelliWrite® Technology writes much larger sequential disk I/Os from
Windows virtual machines for better performance and also makes less work
for copy-on-write technology that copies/tracks every write. The
virtual platform will operate faster using this technology alone.
In addition V-locity provides InvisiTasking® Technology as well.
InisiTasking® means that the software will operate in the background of
the system so as not to cut across the production needs of other virtual
machines. InvisiTasking® guarantees complete invisibility while
optimizing all Windows operating systems. It also eliminates the need to
schedule or monitor defrag where it is needed, even when virtual
machines are dynamically added or removed.
Virtual Disk Intelligence automatically detects virtual disk types like
VMware Linked Clones and Microsoft’s Differencing Disks. The result is
faster performance that is catered to the specific type of that is being
used on the virtual platform for seamless integration.
V-locity also provides companies with Virtual Disk Compaction. This is
necessary for use with Thin/Dynamic disks. These disks are set to resize
but only ever grow, never shrinking by themselves if data are deleted.
The result is free space “holes” that will never be reused and take up
space on the host file system that could be allocated in other ways.
Virtual Disk Compaction provides a graphical user interface that shows
how much space can be saved by compacting the data. There is also an
easy one-click way to being the compaction process.
V-locity provides the ultimate protection for a virtual platform. A
company that is tired of spending money and time taking care of multiple
server environments needs to invest in a virtualization system that can
increase productivity and efficiency. After switching it is important
that the system be protected by a virtual platform disk optimizer and
V-locity is the only way to get maximum I/O performance.
