LSFS & Defrag Tools ????

[fbifido]

Has anyone Tested Diskeeper 12 or V-locity4 VM / Server [ ... ]?
This should help with IOPS over the network, it also have an in-build tester.

I am looking at getting Diskeeper 12 Server or V-Locity 4 Server for my SAS Storage Server, that's running Windows Server 2012 R2 with 6 1GB NICs.
and V-locity 4 VM for my virtual machines, the windows one anyway, it can't do Linux.
I have write the company about these 3 products to see what's my best choice when using vSphere 5.5

Any surjection or recommendation is welcome.

Thank you.

[anton (staff)]

That thing works for general-purpose classic design file systems like NTFS, ZFS or BtrFS. LSFS is log-structured file system so it handles defragmentation and clustering (keeping blocks with the same addresses near to each other) a) automatically and b) in a completely non-transparent to upper stuff way.

Making long story short: dump defragmenters and optimizers with LSFS. They are not going to do any good in the best case.

[ChrisCDI]

Anton,

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but LSFS will handle the actual file systems themselves, but what about defragging the VMs themselves to keep their OS files in optimized locations/orders? This question continues to come up, in most SAN related discussions, irregardless of vendor, and I haven't heard a good answer although we have debated it back and forth.

Thanks,
Chris

[anton (staff)]

LSFS is very different from other file systems so keeping data clustered (logical blocks with increasing or descending numbering close to each other) does not guarantee they (blocks) would be close to each other on the raw storage. So NTFS layered on top of LSFS should not be defragmented. NTFS inside VM should not be defragmented as well.

Anton,

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but LSFS will handle the actual file systems themselves, but what about defragging the VMs themselves to keep their OS files in optimized locations/orders? This question continues to come up, in most SAN related discussions, irregardless of vendor, and I haven't heard a good answer although we have debated it back and forth.

Thanks,
Chris

[fbifido]

So NTFS layered on top of LSFS should not be defragmented. NTFS inside VM should not be defragmented as well.

Can you elaborate on this some more, not fully getting this.

"NTFS layered on top of LSFS" and "NTFS inside VM" !, doesn't LSFS runs on any windows server File system ?

1) Vmware creates VMFS in the LSFS file via iSCSI, which is on a NTFS file system.
2) Hyper-V creates NTFS in the LSFS file via iSCSI, which is on NTFS file system.

VMWare creates a windows xp/vista/7/8/2008/2012 VM which creates a NTFS on VMFS, which goes to #1 above.
Hyper-V creates a windows xp/vista/7/8/2008/2012 VM which creates a NTFS on NTFS, which goes to #2 above.

VMWare creates a linux VM, which creates a ext4fs on VMFS, which goes back to #1 above.
Hyper-V creates a linux VM, which creates a ext4fs on NTFS, which goes back to #2 above.

Q1) Does this mean no fragmented files are created ?

logical blocks with increasing or descending numbering close to each other

Q2) And that in turn makes the VM file system fragment free ?

Q3)

[anton (staff)]

LSFS is log-structured file system so does a lot of things including handling file fragmentation in a totally different way compared to general-purpose file systems (NTFS, ZFS etc). Making long strory short: it does keeping logical blocks with a close addresses sorted inside pages (big 4-8-16 MB sectors LSFS uses internally) automatically. Think about LSFS as of a "thing" doing automatic defragmentation.