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.
Just like any other software virtual machines still require (unless you have a very specialist setup) to be run from the hard drive, which is still and probably will remain so for many years to come, the slowest part of your system. Drives can be broken in sub parts know as partitions which can then be utilized as a different drive so to speak but hard disk fragmentation is still an issue.
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.
What is more, the premature wear that all of this fragmentation can cause to the hard disk storage can dramatically reduce the useable life of the storage below. Even complex, high performance, RAID arrays can be reduced to a snail like crawl due to high levels of fragmentation. If this problem starts to show itself on a number of the storage devices in any array you could be left with a situation where data recovery is your only option.
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.
Utilizing defragmentation tools can help to alleviate the problem but often the use of some of these tools is very invasive and will render your system virtually unusable while they are running so what other options do you have.
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.
Just like any other software virtual machines still require (unless you have a very specialist setup) to be run from the hard drive, which is still and probably will remain so for many years to come, the slowest part of your system. Drives can be broken in sub parts know as partitions which can then be utilized as a different drive so to speak but hard disk fragmentation is still an issue.
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.
What is more, the premature wear that all of this fragmentation can cause to the hard disk storage can dramatically reduce the useable life of the storage below. Even complex, high performance, RAID arrays can be reduced to a snail like crawl due to high levels of fragmentation. If this problem starts to show itself on a number of the storage devices in any array you could be left with a situation where data recovery is your only option.
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.
Utilizing defragmentation tools can help to alleviate the problem but often the use of some of these tools is very invasive and will render your system virtually unusable while they are running so what other options do you have.
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.
About the Author:
Author Bio: Mike White is a technology enthusiast with a keen interest in business IT services and support, Hard Drive Recovery, Raid Recovery computer hardware and design and technology news and events.
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