Diskeeper Corporation reached out to me via email last week letting me know that they’ve released a new white paper on optimizing VMs. I’m making the three page document available for download via the following link:
Best Practice Protocols: Optimization of VMware Systems (416KB)
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Not sure if in-guest defragmentation is something very relevant when your ESXi hosts are connected to big storage arrays with hundreds of disks, huge cache, tiering, etc…
Perhaps for small shops running datastore on local disks.
Rgds,
Didier
Well, The first page is title and there are only two pages in this white paper.
By the way, is this VMware ready? meaning VMware certified this? I am wondering how this is going to work with different SAN vendors!!!
Deduplication, Replicaion???!!!
Let me know if anyone deployed this and got any results.
Disk Defrag debate between I.T Admin will never end.
http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/10/tip-defragmenta.html
I’m Almost 90% sure that Boche is getting paid to put this post up. It’s kinda like Kobe Bryant and Vitamin Water. Kobe is Boche and they both don’t need Vitamin Water or Diskkeeper to “Optimize” their VM’s.
Boche designs Storage\ESX\Networks with skill. Kobe makes 30+ point per game with skill no Vitamin Water needed.
It is VMware Ready: http://alliances.vmware.com/public_html/catalog/ViewProduct.php?Id=a045000000GOxISAA1&productName=V-locity%202.0
V-locity includes a fragmentation prevention technology that is 100% compatible with Copy-on-Write SAN (repl, dedupe,etc…) and VMware solutions (snaphots/any CBT based technology).
Dozens/hundreds of spindles and GBs of cache can mitigate fragmentation – to some degree. It is a matter of how much fragmentation (just like with DAS). A mild amount may not be much of a problem.
We have engineers who can assist in 2 hour “proof of concept” tests using Iometer, SQLIO, Jetstress, etc….
Michael,
Diskeeper Corp
“I’m Almost 90% sure that Boche is getting paid to put this post up.”
You’re 100% wrong.
Boche
I’m thinking that this is something that anybody running a NetApp array will stay away from. If you talk to NetApp support about defrag they’ll tell you everytime to never, never do it. Not with physical hosts and not with VMs.
If I understand this right, the product only prevents fragmentation? It is not a defrag tool.
Condisering Jason works for major player in the SANS space, I highly doubt that he would put somthing up in his Blog that he does not feel would benifit preformance.
Full Disclosure:
“Dear Jason,
As your User Group as shown interest in our technology in the past, perhaps you would be interested in making this new white paper on optimizing virtual systems available to your group members.
Diskeeper Corporation”
I glanced at the whitepaper. I did not download an eval or test it in the lab (yet). No money exchanged hands. I have no qualified opinions to provide since I have not tested the product. Do I have an opinion on defragmenting virtual storage arrays? Yes.
This short post went up for the purposes of passing along information to the Minneapolis VMware Users Group as well as other readers who may be interested.
I used Diskeeper many years ago in a large enterprise server environment (non-virtual) and was satisfied overall with the product. I will forever remember the phrase “set it and forget it” as being instantiated in my brain from the Diskeeper product.
There’s nothing more to it than that.
@PJ V-Locity can do defrag and intelliwrite
Jason,
I tested out v-locity 2 and if you turn off the auto defrag it has little effect on the amount of change block data. But if you enable it your backups with products like Veeam will get HUGE!
Check out my blog if you want to see the tests i did.