Optimizing virtual hard disks

Optimizing virtual hard disks

There are several ways you can optimize a virtual hard disk. If you want to improve the performance of a virtual hard disk, consider taking one or more of the following actions:

• Store the virtual hard disk on hardware that offers better performance, such as a SCSI disk or a storage area network. Each of these types of storage is compatible with Virtual Server 2005.
• Defragment the physical disk on a regular basis, especially if you are using a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk. The data stored on a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk will grow increasingly fragmented as the size of the disk grows, because storage space is used only as it is needed. As the size grows it is less likely that the space will be contiguous.

There are also steps you can take to improve performance in general. For more information, see Improving performance.