How To Boost VMware ESX Performance - Free White Paper

VMware performance guru, Scott Drummonds, recently asked Raxco to prove the importance of virtual guest defragmentation. If you don't know Scott, or his blog, he spends much of his time analyzing data from customer environments to determine how administrators can squeeze every last bit of performance out of their vSphere/ESX implementations. From time to time, he's taken a look at disk defragmentation and its impact on virtualization performance and really wanted to get the scoop.

 

So we got together with Scott to evaluate the impact of fragmentation on a single virtual machine. In his widely-read blog (link below) Scott sets up the test:

 

"Before I describe the test and its results, I want to share an important point on guest defragmentation.  Most of the computer literate are aware that file fragmentation–the separation of logically contiguous pieces of a file–can hurt storage performance. But many may not realize that free space fragmentation is as big of an issue. When free space is fragmented, writes take longer and files are re-fragmented rapidly. PerfectDisk defragments files and free space and the results below benefit from both of these improvements."

 

I don’t want to give away the results, but I will quote just one of Scott's comments here: "Let me repeat one of those amazing data points: the average IO latency dropped from about 55 ms to less than 4 ms. While this is a phenomenal number, the increase depends on characteristics of the storage system. Since these improvements are configuration dependent, your results may vary considerably."

 

You can read Scott’s entire blog post, with lots of data and charts, here: Windows Guest Defragmentation, Take Two

 

Raxco just released the new PerfectDisk 11 vSphere Bundle. If you’ve previously evaluated PerfectDisk 10 vSphere/ESX, you really should take a fresh look a version 11. If you’re in an ESX environment and haven’t evaluated the PerfectDisk 11 vSphere Bundle, you’re really missing the “performance boat”. Please click on the link below for more information and access to the free 30-day evaluation.

 

·         PerfectDisk 11 vSphere Bundle

 

Free White Paper: The Performance Impact of Windows Guests Defragmentation and Free Space Consolidation on VMware ESX

 

 

As always, my entire team is here to help with anything that you need. If you would like to see a custom quotation that reflects the new host based pricing model (no charge for guests), just let me know.

 

Regards,