disable defragmentation on WMware View with WIN7

[anonimous]

hi

Is it a good idea to disable defragmentation on WMware View Desktop with WIN7?

BTW does Windows as a VM guest need any windows defragmentation?

[tacticsbaby]

I have seen this recommendation in most of the optimization guides that I have used. The idea is that by disabling scheduled defrag on your VMs you are reducing the amount of IOPS your storage will need.

[KimbalB]

I wonder if maybe the new V-Locity product from Diskeeper might be the way to go?   Using DK on the physical server cuts down on I/O requests.   I am going to be checking out the V-Locity product and I wonder if anyone has tried it?   It is supposed to close up the holes that VM acquire over time?

[kgsivan · Accepted solution]

Typically Defragmentation is not required in a Virtual Disk environment. Defragment benefits becomes considerable in case of conventional Physical Hard Disks which has  magnetic disks inside

By default Windows 7 is set to defragment every week. This is not desirable in case of View Desktops. Only the golden image of the View Desktop can be defragmented, and you should never defragment the Deployed Desktops due to following resaons:

1. Defragging a frive creates a very hig I/O overhead and can quickly cause sufficient I/O to the shared storage to cause the perfomance issues
2. If the Virtual Hard Disks are thinly allocated, defragmenting the virtual machine hard drive will cause the virtual machine hard disk to quickly expand in size. For example running defragmentation on a virtual machine that was using only 600 MB of space after deployment can balloon up to 4 GB or more of allocated space

Refer Page 28 @ https://community.emc.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/503111-21619/h8043-windows-virtual-desktop-vi...

[fredmut]

We are using V-Locity across all of our virtual servers and VDI machines.  It has increased the performance of all our machines by coordinating who accesses the disks at the same time.  It allows us to go longer between machine refreshes since the desktops stay at a peak performance for longer.  It continually defragments our dedicated user drives which seems to have helped with performance too.

The only software that has improved our performance more has been moving to the TredMicro Deep Security from OfficeScan.