The intensified demand for IT network efficiency and lower operating costs is driving the phenomenal growth of virtualization. Effectively shared resources are of critical importance in a virtual environment but are severely impacted by three key barriers. V-locity 2 optimizes the entire virtual platform with new technology that operates invisibly with zero system resource conflicts. On Windows platforms, each V-locity component optimizes its respective OS, preventing most fragmentation from occurring. With the little that does occur, it defragments files and consolidates free space almost immediately. This minimizes unnecessary I/Os passed from the OS to the disk subsystem and aligns data on the drives for previously unattainable levels of speed and reliability.