cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Recommendation on disk defrag for MSDP volume

rizwan84tx
Level 6
Certified

Dear All,

The MSDP volume on windows media server is heavily fragmented and can you suggest if disk defragmentation is recommended. This is a new media server (VM backup host) and MSDP holds 2 TB data.

Has any one run a defrag on volume hosting MSDP? It will be helpful, if you can share the MSDP data size and time taken for defrag elapsed time.

 

Environment: NBU 7.5.0.1 on Windows 2008 R2 EE

 

Best Regards,

Rizwan.

8 REPLIES 8

V4
Level 6
Partner Accredited

i haven't yet tried.. soon i would  be... as our two of MSDP are also heavily fragmented... would try to simulate in my lab.. and check  for any impacts post defragmentation...

 

i don't find any major impact on doing defragmentation as it's MSDP database which knows how chunk of data are stored withing MSDP store it's fingerprint db that plays role in merging them into file during restore .. ideally defragmenting MSDP should improve disk performance during data retrival ...

rizwan84tx
Level 6
Certified

Thanks for your comment speed. If we start defrag and then i would believe that we can't run jobs to MSDP, so im eager to know about it's elapsed time. I don't have a environment to test this now; hope backups/restores not affected post defrag.

Yogesh9881
Level 6
Accredited

Disk defragmentation is OS part & hence there should not any problem for any application.

However about elapsed time, it is totally depend on server performance & disk size.

I will suggest you do not perform MSDP backup/restore during defrag process.

AlexKlein
Level 2

Hi rizwan84tx,

Does MSDP perform it's tasks on a block-based or file-based level?

This will help me determine how to respond.


-Alex

alex_goldblatt
Not applicable
Employee Accredited

It's about the same like defrag Data Domain of a VTL with dedupe: it only disrupts storage system without gaining any advantages.

MSDP has a built-in mechanism ensuring high probability of segment locality for high performance. It takes care automatically of defrag on the storage container level - and should NOT be touched in any other way.

rizwan84tx
Level 6
Certified

Hi Alex,

On MSDP, DeDuplication is performed in file level and then file is broken to segments.

rizwan84tx
Level 6
Certified

Is there any tech note that highlights the same? so that we can have it as a valid reference.

AlexKlein
Level 2

 

Thanks rizwan84tx,


If it's file level then a software solution called Diskeeper will certainly help. The best reference I can give you is for you to test it on your own by installing trialware.

We have many customers who have different variables in place that would cause our basic test results not to apply to them.

The software I mentioned has proprietary technology called the Terabyte Volume Engine®, which is designed specifically for large accounts of data – such as the 2TB of data you mentioned.

You can download trialware here - http://www.condusiv.com/trialware

After about a week, I would be curious to see how it helped the situation. If you could post how many fragments it removed after that period of time, that would be awesome.

Hope this helps!

-Alex