Approach Virtualization with Caution

Although virtualization is being touted as a ‘panacea for all IT ills’, it's not something that can be implemented without a great deal of thinking going into it. While moving into the ‘Cloud’ does seem to be a good idea, a proper assessment needs to be made if the ultimate goal of performance optimization is to be achieved.

A decision has to be taken as to whether virtualization is to be complete or partial and based on the virtual platform that the company is migrating into, hardware and software requirements have to be identified.

Performance Testing and resource consumption needs to be conducted on a few servers or workstations with a proper backup for redundancy and failure. Setup tools need to be built in order to monitor and correct performance issues.

Of course, if virtualization works for the company, it will reap the benefits of hardware reduction, increased operational savings, environmental benefits and centralized management to name a few.

However, the scenario is not all rosy. Sharing resources on the same host brings in its wake a host of problems. Files are fragmented, the shared I/O resources are not effectively prioritized and when files are deleted, there is wastage of free disk space.

“One of the key areas to any good virtualization project is performance optimization. Some folks tend to focus their optimization efforts around CPU and memory, but fail to consider the effects that virtual machines and file fragmentation can have on a virtual environment. Defragmentation can help considerably with disk latency issues and relieve many of the pressures and bottlenecks associated with consolidating disk I/O channels,” David Marshall, in a press release.

Even if defragmentation and antivirus scans are run, bottlenecks appear. When such general tasks like are run at the same time on all the virtual machines, there is a tendency to affect the performance on the host. If the performance of one machine is affected, all machines sharing the same host are also affected. This defeats the very purpose of moving to the Cloud.

Diskeeper data performance technology keeps systems free of fragmentation and increases the speed and reliability of machines. Its V-locity virtual platform disk optimizer ensures maximum I/O performance on virtual servers and full efficiency.



Mini Swamy is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell