Virtualized environments are quickly becoming the norm for small and medium-sized businesses, even if they’re only using them for a portion of their overall storage needs. A VPS or cloud solution lets a business store and retrieve their data without the need for an in-house server, and there are a number of benefits that businesses can immediately enjoy, including lowered costs and greater ease of use. Performance optimization of VM environments has been laid largely by the wayside, as businesses were rarely using the maximum storage capacity they were allotted. But as virtual sprawl becomes more common, so too has virtual stall – in which virtual machines are overloaded with data from various businesses and it is distributed in such a way that performance for all users suffers.
Now, the need for optimal performance is once again at the forefront as businesses try to determine the best way to optimize their storage for maximum results, a problem compounded by the fact that virtual server instances cannot see other instances running on the same server. This means that any performance monitoring tool on a company’s slice of the virtual pie will detect only the amount of resources allocated to the company, and will not see other VMs or the hypervisor itself.
New ways are being developed to optimize virtual servers both at a VM level – using performance monitoring tools and improving OS usage, and also at a hypervisor level, by tuning the CPU and ensuring each VM instance receives the amount of memory it needs to run smoothly. While the market for VM optimization is currently small, it is growing rapidly as companies find themselves in a position of needing to squeeze the most out of their virtual machines.
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