Looking for the best scenario to do P2V.

[Julian_Milano]

I have the following virtual farm setups:

Melbourne & Sydney:

- 7x VMware hosts in each site running VMware 4.1.

- 1x datacentre in each site made up of 7 virtual hosts.

- 2x SANs in each site used for storage of virtual servers.

- 1x vSphere server, as a virtual in the Sydney VMware datacentre.

Melbourne & Malaysia:

- 7x VMware hosts in MAL site running VMware 5.1.

- 2x VMware hosts in MEL site running VMware 5.1.

- 1x datacentre in each site.

- 2x SANs in each site used for storage of virtual servers.

- 1x vSphere server, as a virtual in the MAL VMware datacentre.

So my point here is that the new VMware farm we are setting up in Melbourne has 2x VMware hosts local in MEL site, but the vSphere server is located in MAL site.

I am planning to do P2V conversions of physical servers in the MEL site and the target will be the new VMware 5.1 farm in Melbourne. I'm testing the process and found that a P2V of the server below is taking around 14 hours:

* HP BL685 G1 server in C700 enclosure.

*** C-drive is 136GB.

*** D-drive is 300GB.

*** E-drive is 2150GB.

The conversion rates for each of the drives is:

C-drive:     54 min

D-drive:     120 min

E-drive:     18 Hrs (actually it's still running as I type but the ETA is 18 hours all up!?)

So my question is, with the vSphere server being in another country, Malaysia, where PING times from Melbourne are around 120ms, is this why it is taking so long to convert one machine?

[taylorb · Accepted solution]

The data goes from the physical server directly into the management vNIC on the VM host.  It doesn't bounce through the Vcenter server, so I don't think that's playing a role in the performance (or lack thereof). 

You may look at this thread.   Vmware added SSL encryption to Vmware converter by default starting with v5.0.   Apparently you can get a big speed boost by disabling it if you don't need  encryption.  Considering we are usually talking LAN to LAN traffic, I think it's probably safe for most to disable it.

Increasing the cloning performance

However, I still had an 800GB VM take several hours, so don't expect that 2TB volume to happen too quickly.  

[bayupw]

Do you have a dedicated VM/server for the vCenter Converter?

In my experience, conversion would take around 20GB-50GB per hour - depends on the used disk space too.
See also this KB on how to increase the speed of conversion: VMware KB: Increasing the speed of conversion when converting a physical or virtual machine using VM...

[Julian_Milano]

vCenter V5.1 is running as a virtual on the Malaysian VMware farm.

vCentre V4.1 is running as a virtual on the Melbourne VMware farm.

I didn't see any difference when running a P2V on either so it looks like it IS dependent on where the destination host is located.

Thanks all.