What about defragmentation of a Guest OS in a Virtual Machine?
Here’s a view of the Disk Fragementer that is part of the System Tools with Windows 7:
This means that sequential I/O operations should be faster after a defrag. Defragmentation moves blocks around the disk to bring together blocks belonging to the same file in an effort to make the file contiguous on disk. Well, historically, if you ran a defragmentation* operation against an OS disk (typically Windows), you would expect to see a performance improvement. What is it that defragmentation is supposed to give you? In fact, we’ve been having these conversations for a long time now. This has come up time and time again, and I am going to share with you some conversations that have been occurring within VMware on this topic.
