There has been a dramatic increase in the demand for
virtualization platforms in the last few years. The demand stems from
companies trying to find more efficient ways to handle their business
management systems and reduce the fixed costs that they must spend to
maintain their servers. Compared to the standard multiple server
environment, virtualization platforms provide highly increased
efficiency in IT network administration and substantially reduced costs
of operating.
Multiple server environments were the standard for many years because
they allowed companies to securely store information in different
places. However, spreading information across multiple servers accrued a
significant amount of wasted space that was never going to be used. The
machines also severely limited the amount of time that IT
administrators had to focus on other aspects of the business.
Applications and operating systems are stored on their own dedicated
servers in a multiple server environment. While this kept the file
separate in case of a virus or other problem, the space that they did
not use on the server was often left unused. This creates a lot of extra
space that companies were paying for but unable to capitalize on by
storing information. At the same time, with many different servers, IT
admins were forced to spend the majority of their time updating, backing
up, archiving and performing general maintenance on the machines. This
severely limited their ability to focus on improving other aspects of
improving the company.
A virtualization platform allows companies to condense their operating
systems and applications onto a single server. The information on the
server can then be accessed by different virtual machines that share the
resources of the single server. This allows the company to maximize the
space that they have on the server and eliminate wasted space. It also
frees IT admins from taking so much of their time caring for multiple
machines.
There are several obstacles that must be overcome for a virtual platform
to operate at maximum efficiency. I/O bandwidth bottlenecks faster due
to accelerated fragmentation, virtual machine competition for shared I/O
resources is not prioritized effectively across the platform and
virtual disks that are set to dynamically grow do not resize when data
are deleted. These problems can affect the speed and storage efficiency
of a virtualization platform and must be eliminated to achieve maximum
efficiency.
To avoid these obstacles it is important for a company to install a
virtual platform disk optimizer on their virtualization platform. A
virtualization platform disk optimizer like V-locity from
Diskeeper
Corporation will make sure that the system is running as smoothly as
possible.
V-locity uses a unique combination of technology to provide results.
IntelliWrite® Technology allows the platform to write much larger
sequential disk I/Os from Windows virtual machines while creating less
work for copy-on-write technology that copies and tracks every write.
InvisiTasking® Technology guarantees that the software will operate
invisibly in the background, eliminating the concern that it will cut
across the production needs of other virtual machines.
Companies that use special virtual disk types can take advantage of
Virtual Disk Intelligence, technology that allows V-locity to determine
what type of disk is being used and work with the special disk to
provide optimum performance and speed. To eliminate wasted free space
V-locity provides Virtual Disk Compaction. When a Thin/Dynamic disk does
not shrink after data are deleted free space accumulates that will
never be used again. V-locity provides a graphical user interface to
identify this wasted space and a one-click option to begin the
compaction process.
The switch to a virtual platform is a must for any company that wants to
eliminate needless expenses and give their IT employees more time to
focus on streamlining business operations. To make sure that they get
the most out of the virtual platform it is important that a company
installs a virtual platform disk optimizer and V-locity is the only way
to achieve maximum I/O performance from your virtual machines.
