New Diskeeper V-locity 3 ($200)

The release of V-locity 3, Diskeeper Corporation‘s virtual platform disk optimizer, includes the an online function for zeroing free space.

This engine zeros out unused data blocks on virtual disks and makes virtual disk compaction easy. It also allows Storage vMotion (VMware) or Quick Storage Migration (Microsoft) to compact a disk when migrating virtual disks – In some cases, zeroed free space can even be reclaimed during a storage migration on the virtual platform.

Naveen Louis, Technical Consultant for Diskeeper, comments: "With this new technology users can now, for the first time, prepare free space for reclamation without taking the machines offline."

He further states: "With thin disks you needn’t allocate all of your storage up front. While this helps with better storage management, the drawback is deleted space not being refunded automatically. The watermark of disk growth rises and rises. The solution is setting up a disk compaction schedule, historically requiring an administrator to endure a lengthy process of zeroing every bit of free space on a thin disk up to full provisioning while that virtual machine is offline. With V-locity 3, zeroing of free space occurs online, automatically, and invisibly-no lost production. Subsequently running disk compaction from your virtual platform reclaims all of that unused space to the storage array."

V-locity 3 also has integration with VMware ESXi, as well as support for other platforms such as ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer. Other new features include V-Aware which will detect external resource usage from other VM’s on the virtual platform and eliminate resource contention on the Server host. New CogniSAN detects external resource usage within a shared storage system – such as a SAN.

"The Space Reclamation feature ensures that unused space on virtual drives is zeroed out and compacted in such a way that when a virtual guest is migrated to a different virtual server via Storage vMotion, only the allocated data is transferred. This speeds up the virtual storage migration process and decreases the load on the shared storage subsystem," said Bill Moller, RainWorx.

"I see the V-Aware portion as the biggest benefit. Also the performance I have seen running the new version and I like the fact that we no longer have to install anything on the ESX host," said Tom Ruane, IT Manager, Churchill Corporate Services, Inc.

V-locity 3 Benefits: