Diskeeper just released a new whitepaper pushing the need of defragmentation to avoid virtual infrastructures performance bottlenecks:
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The purpose of defragmentation is to consolidate file fragments into a single extent, increasing access speed, and to reduce free space fragments to a small handful of larger chunks.Virtualization does have its dangers, as it incurs greater stress on physical resources. While under utilization of CPU may be a driving factor to virtualize servers, other hardware resources may become overtaxed. Given that a host system has limited ability (depends on application) to page memory used by the guest systems, the most recognized bottleneck to address is physical memory (RAM). Options to programmatically alleviate memory bottlenecks incur performance issues when the disk is re-introduced. Another major component and perhaps less acknowledged is the disk subsystem. In many cases, depending the purpose and application of the guest/virtual systems, the disk bottleneck will be the most significant barrier to performance.
The remainder of this paper will discuss the increased importance of disk performance…
Donwload the whitepaper at source.