With the increasing popularity of Virtual Machines comes an issue that many may not be aware of. This problem is an age-old issue that has affected systems from the very early days of storage. It can cause hard drive failure leading to expensive data loss scenarios necessitating data recovery professionals. This problem is, of course, fragmentation.
Virtual machines must still make use of the slowest part of any modern computer system: hard drive technology. Hard Drives can be partitioned to appear as dedicated individual devices, these devices are then often utilized to store virtual partitions and virtual operating systems. Underneath this "virtual" layer, the hardware is storing data as it always has, in a fragmented inefficient manner.
Fragmentation occurs on all hard drives and is part of the way the operating system stores the data on a disk. It won’t lay it down nice and neatly in one continuous block, but will lay it wherever there is a space. One file could literally be split into many separate places on the hard disk and this is fragmentation. If you have one OS running it can be bad but if you are running virtual machines the problems is far more serious.
Fragmentation will not only slow down your computer or server but due to the excessive and unwarranted extra movement of the heads, the life of your storage device(s) can be seriously reduced. The problem is not only limited to single drives however, even if you have a very well specked raid set up, fragmentation can get so severe that the only viable option is data recovery or server rebuild.
You would like to think that as the problem of file fragmentation has been with us since the advent of hard drive based computer systems, operating system vendors would have come up with a software solution to ensure the problem is eradicated at source. Whilst Mac OS X will partially help with files under a 20 mb size, Windows operating systems seem to pay it no heed whatsoever.
Defragmentation utilities can take care of this problem, however, running them practically ties up the machine until completion, slowing the machine to a crawl. So what can be done to remove this issue? There are a number of possibilities that can be tried.
Fortunately we are not left to the operating systems alone as there are a number of third party defragmentation applications that are far superior to the inbuilt OS tools. These can be scheduled to run when system usage is very low for example whilst the system is idle or the screen saver is running. As you go defragmentation is my personal choice.
Invest in dedicated hardware. Not the cheapest solution but for business and power user home systems probably the most sensible route. Dedicated hardware could be an additional hard drive (internal or external) a dedicated raid array or even an SSD device. The actual solution will depend on how mission critical the application actually is.
Ensuring your systems are working in tip top condition is vital to maintaining a productive IT infrastructure. For more great computing tips visit the IT Support Manchester , or click here for hard drive repair information and raid data recovery advice.
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