VMware recommends to “Defragment the file systems on all guests”. This advice is found under Disk I/O Performance Enhancement Advice in the vSphere documentation.

Eliminate vSphere Guest I/O bottlenecks

PerfectDisk vSphere is a complete solution that optimizes your physical host, guest machines, and your storage solution to eliminate I/O throughput and I/O latency bottlenecks. This includes the optimization of both fat and thin provisioned virtual storage on both local and external RAID / SAN solutions.

Virtual Infrastructure Awareness Technology

Virtual infrastructure awareness technology monitors resource availability at the physical host level and enables high resource availability and intelligent real time I/O prioritization during file system optimization. This technology allows optimizations to occur dynamically between virtual guests so as to completely eliminate the resource contention caused by simultaneous optimizations. PerfectDisk vSphere also includes full support for vMotion to track resource availability when a virtual guest migrates from host to host.

Thin Provisioned Drive Auto-Detection

PerfectDisk automatically detects thin-provisioned drives in both physical and virtual environments. For drives that are auto-detected as thin-provisioned, PerfectDisk automatically will configure itself so that defrag operations performed on the drive are less likely to fully provision the drive. 

Automatic background optimization

PerfectDisk's OptiWrite™ technology prevents most fragmentation on your drive before it occurs, which prevents your system from slowing down. OptiWrite™ detects when Windows is going to fragment files and intelligently redirects I/O to stop the fragmentation from occurring. System performance is maintained and the need to utilize CPU and Disk I/O resources to defragment files is greatly reduced. Because less defragmentation is needed, there is a direct benefit in the form of energy saved in both CPU usage and in the reading and writing to a disk. It saves in energy costs and in the time required to defragment a file system.

Short Stroke Method for Thin-Provisioned Environments

Short Stroke method improves optimization speed and improves support for thin provisioned drives:

• Allows for optimization of thin provisioned disks without introducing excessive growth.
• Accelerate the optimization of large disk array by drastically shortening seek times for all electromechanical drive types and arrays.

Dramatically Improve vSphere Performance

Proven to increase I/O throughput, and decrease I/O request latency by 35% or more. PerfectDisk vSphere enables the best possible performance for your virtual machines and maximizes the performance of your storage solution. Using I/O prioritization for zero resource contention overhead, PerfectDisk vSphere optimizes server virtualization performance management by defragging file systems for increased IOP performance and completely eliminating performance issues relating to split I/O requests.

Testing performed on identical disks using VMware’s vscsiStats show that defragmentation of Windows guest VM’s delivers significant performance and throughput improvements. The PerfectDisk defragmented disk produced the following:

• 28% reduction in total IO
• 1,200% improvement in large I/O (>524K)
• 49% reduction in I/O taking longer than 15ms
• 28% improvement in throughput

Using actual vscsiStats disk latency data we see the PerfectDisk defragmented disk (VM2) practically eliminated the total number of disk IO taking 50000µs (50ms) or longer. The mean latency for the two disks was 58ms for VM1 and 35ms for the PerfectDisk disk.

VMware Technical Alliance Partner Solution

PerfectDisk vSphere is a Native 64-bit application providing exceptional performance on 64-bit vSphere guests.  PerfectDisk vSphere supports virtual machines of all server roles, including Clustered and non-Clustered SQL Server, Exchange Server and File & Print server roles.

Host based licensing – Unlimited Guests

Licensed per physical host, PerfectDisk vSphere is a cost effective solution with exceptional ROI. Each licensed host supports unlimited guest licenses for easy license management and superior value. No additional costs per CPU or CPU core. Volume pricing is available.