While most products that work well in physical infrastructures can be ported inside virtual machines, a number of them are not really optimized to work in virtual data centers.
It’s the case of all agent-based solutions that perform tasks on the virtual machines’ hard drives without any knowledge of the concurrent access to resources happening behind the scene.
It’s the case of anti-virus solutions, for instance: right now leading vendors like McAfee and like Trend Micro are developing new version of their products, optimized for virtualization (and specifically for VDI environments) that can coordinate the agents activity to avoid that every protected virtual machine tries to scan its vHD or tries to download the vaccine update at the same time, killing the I/O channel.
But it’s also the case of disk defragmentation solutions.
Diskeeper is aware of this issue and released a version of its engine called V-Locity in May 2009: the product featured a new architecture that synchronize the defragmentation process across all the virtual machines and the host an a shrinking capability that is automatically invoked as soon as the defragmentation inside the VM is finished.
This week the company released V-Locity 2.0, which introduces a new engine called IntelliWrite.
Diskeeper claims that this new technology is able to rearrange the files inside vHDs in a way to prevent up to 85% of fragmentation:
Copy on write solutions (e.g. as used by Snapshots) take action on changes to data at a block level. Moving data, as is done in a defragmentation job to consolidate file fragments in a logical file system, can trigger copy on write solutions to take extra actions such as using more storage capacity, unnecessarily. Writing a file contiguously eliminates the need to defragment it after it has been created.
V-Locity 2.0 supports both VMware ESX and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. Plus, the product includes a small application that allows you to remotely connect from your Windows desktop to the V-locity Host component on an ESX system.