It’s about 2AM right now in Northeast Ohio, and earlier this evening I started the task of taking all of our virtual servers down so that I could defrag the host machines that they live on.

For taking care of large virtual disk files, I use Contig, which is part of the Windows Sysinternals software lineup.  Basically Contig is a tool for defragmenting large files.  It can take wildcards and even recurse subdirectories if you want it to.  This makes it pretty simple to go to the directory where your virtual machines are kept and defrag all of your .vmdk (virtual disk) files in one sweep.

I was nervous for a good while this evening, because the Contig utility was taking an EXTRA long time to defragment a piece of the virtual hard drive that is part of our Exchange server, and perfmon was showing little-to-no disk activity at the same time.  About halfway through the second paragraph, however, the virtual disk finally finished up and Contig continued on to the next file.  WHEW!

Looking at our file server’s disk usage, I am amazed at how our storage needs have skyrocketed.  When I started in 2005, our dinky little file server had a 30something-GB SCSI drive on it, and it was enough to hold everyone’s information.  Since then we’ve moved to a 425GB RAID array, and we’ve managed to fill over 80% of that space.  Safe to say we’ll be looking for another storage solution sooner than later.