Maximising Your Virtualisation ROI

LONDON, September 15, 2011 -

- By Naveen Louis, Tech Support Specialist

Today, virtualisation is being utilised by many top enterprises to maximise system resource ROI. It’s certainly no surprise; CIOs are always looking to strengthen that bottom line, and when multiple “computers” can be run from a single hardware platform, that bottom line can certainly be strengthened.

However, virtualisation comes with some major challenges of its own.  For example, capacity planning, when dealing with complexity in mixed environments, becomes increasingly difficult. Resource tracking and utilisation becomes a multi-headed hydra.  Historical analysis becomes almost moot when prime resources are constantly shifting and being reallocated.  Device failures, since they are utilised by multiple virtual machines, trigger multiple alerts and tracking down the actual failure becomes an interesting exercise.

A virtual infrastructure is dynamic and responds to the storage and resource needs of the moment - but it must be kept healthy. Virtualization is designed to make the most efficient use of the IT network investment, but succeeds only when resources are shared efficiently without competing with other guests sharing the same hardware. Here then, are three primary barriers:

1. I/O bottlenecks occur from the continuous generation of unnecessary split I/Os. As a result, the more a virtual platform is driven to produce, the slower it responds.

2. Resource conflicts. Virtual machines compete for shared I/O resources and have limited knowledge of actual hardware resource usage. Overloaded disk I/O traffic from one VM will not only run slower, it will slow the I/O speed of another VM.

3. Wasted disk space. Virtual disks set to grow dynamically will never shrink when users or applications remove data. As a result, that physical disk space cannot be allocated to other virtual systems. It also needlessly increases time and resources necessary to perform backups for data continuity and live migration to maintain optimal service levels.

To add to the above mentioned problems, new technologies like CDP, CSV, Snap-shots and de-duplication are becoming common with SANs - you are more likely to use a SAN as your backend storage in a large virtual environment.  Not to mention special Linked clones/differencing disks would be used when you virtualise your desktop estate.  In these situations you would need a proactive approach to address this. A complete optimisation tool which would write files contiguously in the first place would be ideal.

With Diskeeper Corporation’s new V-locity 3^® virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware^® and Hyper-V™, you have a fully integrated software solution that gives the complete package for a fully optimised virtual network. V-locity is compatible with new SAN technologies, requires no scheduling and has no impact on system resources.  Fully automated, IT staff no longer need to spend unnecessary time attending to these inherent problems, and can therefore spend time on other pressing issues.  Best of all, such a solution operates “on-the-fly” using only idle system resources, which means you can get maximum ROI from your network.

For more information on the benefits and features of V-locity 3 visit www.v-locity.com

© 2011 Diskeeper Corporation.  All Rights Reserved.  V-locity is a trademarks owned by Diskeeper Corporation. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

Dorian Culmer, Email: d.culmer at diskeeper.co.uk , Phone: +44(0)1293-763-060