Slow vMotion Transfers between two Hosts

[MarcusOsb]

Hi,

I have two ESXi 5.0 hosts that are experiencing very slow vMotion transfers when cloning an offline VM.

I am only getting about 7MB of transfer between the two, the NIC's on these hosts are 1GB.

Storage is local to the host, one is RAID 5 where as the other is RAID 1

One host has vMotion set up on a single 1GB NIC and the other has a teamed up vMotion & Management connection with two 1GB NIC's

I can't see why it is so slow, any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mark

[BenLiebowitz]

It sounds like your mixing terminology.  Are you talking about a VM migrating between hosts (vMotion) or are you referring to cloning a VM from one host to another (aka cold-clone?) 

I see the information you gave on the networking, and it sounds like the hosts are not setup exactly the same.  Are these hosts in a cluster or are they stand alone hosts?  Are they in the same location using a local network or do you have a WAN to deal with here also?  What other load is on the hosts in question?  How many VMs are running?  What are the memory/CPU resources of the hosts, etc. 

Thanks.

[MarcusOsb]

Thanks for your reply.

I am cloning a VM from one host to another, so yes it is a cold-clone

The hosts are stand alone, no clustering is set up.

All hosts are in the same location using the same local network.

The host I am cloning from is under a bit of a load, out of its 64GB of RAM its using about 60GB. CPU load is low and it has 24 cores, and it's running 11 VM's

The host I am cloning to is a freshly built one, so no VM's are running, RAM is 48GB and CPU cores is 16.

[BenLiebowitz]

The cloning of a VM uses memory and CPU and if the one host is almost out of resources, that could explain the slowness.  Also, RAID-1 and RAID-5 process at different speeds also.  There could be a few different factors affecting the speed of your clone. 

[MarcusOsb]

That sounds like the cause, thanks for your assistance 🙂

[bspagna89]

I agree with BenLiebowitz -- you are more than likely running too hot on the source server.