I've got 3 servers in my environment running ESXi version 3.5.0 (163429). The hardware is the same on all 3 machines. In this environment we have NO san storage space, all local disk
Servers: HP DL 360/Gen 5's, Dual Quad Core CPU's, 20GB of RAM
Datastore 1: 2 x 300GB 10K rpm 2.5 SAS drives in a RAID 1 mirror,
Datastore 2: 4 x 300GB 10K rpm 2.5 SAS drives in a RAID 5 mirror,
As a test, I created a virtual machine running CentOS linux5.3 and gave it a 2GB hard drive. I installed CentOS on the drive. This virtual machine lives in datastore1.
Now, I go into the VMWare Infrastructure client, go into the datastore browser and I copy the file into a subfolder on datastore1 called backups. The file is 2,097,152.00KB and it took 3 minutes and 42 seconds to copy. That equates to about 9MB/sec. Which to me, seems terribly slow.
As a side test, using VMWare Server 2.0 which is installed on my Dell laptop, I created a 2GB file for a VM and copied it under Windows Vista using Windows explorer in 1 minute and 43 seconds. So, that is 2x as fast on a slow laptop drive.
As far as I can tell, the actual performance of the virtual machines themselves is just fine. Nobody is complaining, they load fast and seem to be working great. It's just painful to make an image and then copy it from one folder to another to setup another machine.
Any suggestions on how to improve these speeds, or is this just the way it is?
