Storage maintenance firm Diskeeper has announced the launch of V-locity, a platform designed to optimise virtual storage environments based on Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V platform.

Diskeeper said that virtualised storage can offer a host of benefits, including easier management and resource allocation, but pooling these devices into a single entity can bring new problems, including virtual disk I/O bottlenecks, poorly optimised disk usage and increased fragmentation at the host and guest levels.

"Our customers are asking us to help standardise their virtualised and non-virtualised environments, and to have consistent tools to manage systems and applications," said Dai Vu, director of virtualisation products at Microsoft.

"Disk defragmentation can be worse in virtualised environments because physical drives serve multiple operating systems and applications. Partners such as Diskeeper offer a familiar approach to optimising I/O performance, and broaden the portfolio of products that customers need as they deploy Microsoft virtualisation solutions in the enterprise."

Diskeeper said that customers often fail to realise that server consolidation dramatically increases the I/O traffic of associated storage devices, resulting in heavy processing bottlenecks.

V-locity is designed to tackle this by invisibly defragmenting files, and consolidating free space on every Windows system on which it is installed.

The platform also fully synchronises the ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems, helping to optimise peak server performance and reliability to the entire virtual platform, according to the firm.

Finally, as most virtual hard disks will only grow with demand, V-locity provides tools to help managers monitor and compact virtual storage environments should they shrink over time, allowing the resources to be allocated to other virtual systems.

V-locity is available now and can be downloaded as a 30-day trial from the Diskeeper web site. Pricing depends on volume.