Hi balubeto,
please find the diffrent diffrence and impact of defrag utility which will help you to take sefl desission.
uest Operating System Drives
It is strongly recommended that you defragment using a guest operating system mechanism before taking the first snapshot (or linked clone).
- Workstation makes all its changes to the redo log, not to the original disk, when you run a defragmenting program on the guest after a snapshot. You lose the ability to defragment inside the original disk forever.
- Every sector that moves is copied to the redo log, making the virtual machine redo log extremely large when the disk is heavily fragmented and you run defragmentation after a snapshot.
Performance Impact of Defragmenting Snapshots and Linked Clones
There may be a performance impact when you defragment a linked clone or a virtual machine with a snapshot. Exact performance degradation depends on:
- The fragmentation of the parent virtual machine disk when you created the snapshot or linked clone.
- The nature of the subsequent updates to the parent virtual machine disk.
Defragmentation tends to make the redo file grow. The redo file itself can become defragmented with respect to the host file system. If your use of virtual machines is strongly performance oriented, you should avoid defragmenting — or using — linked clones and snapshots.
Yours, Abbie 