Virtualization Awareness: Managing Disk Resources in a Virtual Environment

As virtualization takes hold in most businesses and large enterprises, the proper management of a virtualized environment is becoming more important than ever. A key aspect of this management is resource availability throughout the environment, including the host and all virtual guest systems. This paper looks at managing disk resources in a virtualized environment, including the unique challenges presented by disk defragmentation. The importance of disk defragmentation in a virtual environment is clear, since the disk drive is the slowest resource in any computing system.