What can be done to optimize VM storage performance?

V-locity^® VM accelerator is a "set and forget" data I/O performance software that allows IT organizations to go faster than ever before in virtualized environments without the cost of new or additional storage hardware. By optimizing reads and writes, V-locity 4 improves VM performance by up to 50%, eliminating application bottlenecks and enabling more VMs on a single, physical server.

While virtualization provides opportunity for consolidation and better hardware utilization, it’s critically important to recognize and never exceed hardware capacities.

In order to better accommodate disk I/O, most virtualization platforms will implement a Storage Area Network (SAN) which can offer greater data throughput, and a dynamic environment to address fluctuations in I/O demands.

While a storage infrastructure can be built out to meet expected demands, there are uncontrollable behaviors that will still impede performance.

One such uncontrollable behavior is fragmentation. As files are written to general purpose local disk file systems, such as Windows NTFS, a natural byproduct is file fragmentation. File fragmentation is a state in which the data stream of a file is stored in non-contiguous clusters in the file system. Fragmentation occurs on the logical volume, and by device drivers is translated to logical blocks, and eventually to physical sectors residing on a storage device. It can be demonstrated as pieces of a file located in a non-contiguous manner. The effect of this file fragmentation is increased I/O overhead, leading to slower system performance for the operating system.

In the case of virtual platforms, a guest operating system is stored as a file (i.e. set of files) on the virtual platforms file system as a “virtual disk”. A virtual disk is essentially a container file, housing all the files that constitute the OS and user data of a VM.

Eliminating fragmentation in VMs, and the corresponding unnecessary disk I/O traffic, is vital to platform-wide VM storage performance and enhances the ability to host more VMs on a shared infrastructure. Implementing V-locity VM accelerator in a virtual environment will enormously improve the application and storage performance of all VMware ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual platforms automatically, intelligently and cost effectively. V-locity is also designed to reclaim disk space, allowing for maximum storage capacity utilization, thus reducing additional storage requirements and hardware costs.

“V-locity works well for servers and is specifically tailored for virtual machines, thus minimal impact, which is important for any VM infrastructure. It's great to find products specifically written for VM's."

– Darhyn Armstrong, Parkland Public School District #70

Download a free trial of V-locity 4 to test on your virtual machines today »