Tackling I/O Issues on Virtual Servers

There’s a lot of consternation these days when it comes to I/O performance in virtual server environments. A lot of IT organizations are convinced that as the number of virtual machines running on each server increases, the subsequent I/O contention this creates results in a need for faster storage systems because application performance can’t be allowed to degrade. That kind of expense, unfortunately, is enough to dampen anyone’s virtualization enthusiasm.

The folks at Diskeeper, however, say that there is a way to optimize the performance of existing storage systems by improving the I/O performance of the disks and more efficiently managing space on the disk. Specifically, the V-locity 3 suite of tools includes tools to prevent fragmentation, detect external resource usage from other virtual machines in order to eliminate resource contention, detect external resource usage within a shared storage system, zero out unused data blocks on virtual disks and optimize large blocks of free space for even faster writes to disk. Best of all, says Diskeeper Product Marketing Manager Damian Giannunzio, this is all designed to happen automatically.

None of this means that IT organizations can put off buying a new storage system forever. But given the relative inexpensive cost of V-locity 3, Giannunzio says it’s a great way to extend the life of an existing storage system. And even after an IT organization invests in a new storage system, chances are that as the number of virtual machines trying to access those storage resources increase, IT organizations will still need software to optimize I/O performance.

V-locity 3 works with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments at the moment, which Giannunzio notes will become a much bigger factor in the market with the introduction of Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 in 2012.

In the meantime, Giannunzio says that managing I/O in virtual environments is increasingly becoming more challenging. Rather than trying to manually balance all those issues on their own, the better part of valor is to automate as many of them as possible. Of course, automating the management of I/O may not solve every problem, but it’s certainly a whole lot better than doing nothing until someone approves a budget increase for new storage systems.