VMware Cloud Community
patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Increasing the cloning performance

There have been many complaints about transfer rate degradation in Converter 5.0.

Converter uses NFC (a proprietary VMware protocol) for cloning to managed destination. Security has been enhanced in Converter 5.0 by encrypting the data transfer. Unfortunately this has caused a more severe performance degradation than expected.
Switching off SSL encryption is a way to work around this issue. Here is how it is done:

  1. Open the converter-worker.xml configuration file. It is located in "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone" folder for Windows Vista or newer or in "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone" for older Windows versions.
  2. Set the key Config/nfc/useSsl to false and save the configuration file.
  3. Restart "VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker" service.

I.e. it should look like:

    ...
    <nfc>
       <readTimeoutMs>120000</readTimeoutMs>
       <useSsl>false</useSsl>
    ...

75 Replies
ivivanov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

However I really doubt it has anything to do with disabling SSL over data channels 🙂

__________
It is worse!
Reply
0 Kudos
continuum
Immortal
Immortal

Hmmm
I started a conversion - noticed that it was very very slow.
I then aborted the task - changed the xml and directly after that the problem occured.

Nothing else was done in the mean time


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

Reply
0 Kudos
patrickds
Expert
Expert

Nice one.

Speed went from 170KB/sec to 75MB/sec by just disabling the SSL option.

Reply
0 Kudos
MMRNOLA
Contributor
Contributor

I have changed this XML and restarted the service and still had an average of 14MB/s transfer rate.

I have a source VM totalling 3TB's ( 2x 1.5TB RDMs) that needs to be V2V's over into our new environment which is using NFS datastores.

Source system has FC LUNs (4GB fiber), VMnetwork = 2x 1GiGe and destination has IP based storage (2x 1GiGe) and VMnetwork = 4x 1 GiGe. I have the converter installed on our Virtual Center server on the destination cluster..

I did a test conversion on a VM with a 40GB VMDK and a 400GB VMDK and it took 23 minutes. The 400GB VMDK was empty in regards to data. With this in mind, the weekend outage is not going to be enough time to do the conversion at the current transfer rate so I am trying to see if I can the conversion process throughput closer to 100MB.

Reply
0 Kudos
AlexMeseguer
Contributor
Contributor

Not sure if you're still following this thread but I wanted to give you a big thanks. You helped increase my conversion from 5-6 MB/s to 20+ with this tip. Hats off to you sir.

Reply
0 Kudos
patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

If it is V2V and you don't change hardware version, you could bypass Converter. E.g. use scp to copy the files directly between datastores and then attach the VMs. Not sure how fast this will be but I would expected to be faster than converter.

Regards,

Plamen

Reply
0 Kudos
patrickds
Expert
Expert

can't you connect the host to both storage systems and perform a migration?

Reply
0 Kudos
HamR
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Also a big thanks from me too.

From an average of ~8MB/s to about 28MB/s. For just one server this is a forecast saving of 4 days for more than 4.4TB of data.

HamR.

Reply
0 Kudos
TomBlue999
Contributor
Contributor

Many thanks also! Improved from more than 8 hours to 1 hour 30 minutes for a specific server.

Made my day, cheers

Reply
0 Kudos
JMIG
Contributor
Contributor

Transfer rate

with SSL: 1 MB/s

witout SSL: 20 MB/s

Thank you!

Reply
0 Kudos
habibalby
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hello,

I have done the SSL tweek, but I'm still at 7.5 max rate speed Smiley Happy

Any suggestion?

Thanks,

Best Regards, Hussain Al Sayed Consider awarding points for "correct" or "helpful".
Reply
0 Kudos
patrickds
Expert
Expert

What's the source hardware, target storage and network?

For older machines, or 100mbit networks, you won't get much higher speeds than that.

Reply
0 Kudos
habibalby
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hi,

Source EMC AX4-5i and Target EMC AX4-5i

Network 1GB

Servers Dell R710 72 GM of memery and 4 Quad Cores.

Best Regards, Hussain Al Sayed Consider awarding points for "correct" or "helpful".
Reply
0 Kudos
patrickds
Expert
Expert

Just to get it clear:

source is a physical server, with data on an AX4-5i

target is ESXi 5, running on Dell R710, with a second AX4-5i storage?

Reply
0 Kudos
habibalby
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

hello,

Sorry, it's a V2V on same host same storage and vConvertor running on same host as well. It's ESXi5 latest version. Source VM running

on AX4-5i LUN and Target Datastore running on same SAN Storage AX4-5i.

Thanks,

Best Regards, Hussain Al Sayed Consider awarding points for "correct" or "helpful".
Reply
0 Kudos
patrickds
Expert
Expert

so why don't you just migrate or clone the VM, instead of using converter for V2V?

Reply
0 Kudos
habibalby
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Because I got an error while I was migrating it with Storage vMotion. Now half of the LUN resides in this datastore and the second half resides of the original datastore Smiley Happy That's why V2V and changing the datastores is the solution.

BUT, V2V is horrible slow don't know why.

Thanks

Sent via BlackBerry® from Batelco

Best Regards, Hussain Al Sayed Consider awarding points for "correct" or "helpful".
Reply
0 Kudos
patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

As a third option you may try to manually copy the VM (e.g. via scp) and then manually add it to the inventory.

HTH

Plamen

Reply
0 Kudos
shanemccook
Contributor
Contributor

So I have a pesky server that I need to P2V.

It is a file server with a 63GB C:, 2 x 400GB volumes and an 800GB volume.

The box is HP Proliant ML370 G5 going into and HP EVA4100 running Windows Server 2003 x86.  All the networks are 1Gb or better.

I am redcuing the CPUs from 8 to 2 and the NICs from 6 to 1, but other than that all of the settings are default.

I've tried setting the SSL to false but I am still getting "Transfer Rate:  4.79 MB/s" ... maybe as high as 5.22 MB/s.

When we tried this in another office we uninstalled the Conveter 5 and installed Converter 4 and took the job from days to hours.  Here we get the same either way.

Any thoughts?

Reply
0 Kudos
patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

There are many things that can affect performance, e.g. network connectivity, disk speed, incuding disk fragmentation, heavy usage of the source, etc. The settings of the destination like number of CPUs do not affect performance. If you have had the same results with converter 4.0, it is certainly not the SSL issue either. I would try first to check the stuff described above.

Regards,

Plamen

Reply
0 Kudos