Estimated transfer speeds and process

[thomps01]

I know 'it depends', but i'm interested to know what transfer speeds people are seeing between source and destination.

I also wanted to check that the transfer goes directly from the source to the destination server, not via the converter if running on another machine in the middle.

Thanks

[esiebert7625]

There are several factors that will determine your transfer speed:

1) NIC speed, obviously Gigabit will be faster then 100mbps

2) Duplex, make sure your server NIC and your physical network ports match, otherwise you will have slow transfer speeds. I usually set both sides to Auto/Auto before the transfer.

3) Copy method, if you re-size disks you will be doing a file by file copy (slower, but less data to copy) instead of a block by block copy (faster).

4) Size/# of files (file by file copy method only) - a large number of smaller files will take longer to copy then a smaller number of large files

In my experience I usually see about 10-12GB an hour copy speeds on 100Mbps connections. The transfer rate will vary during the copy as it goes from copying large files to smaller ones.

[thomps01]

Cheers, regarding the direct transfer of data is this the case?

It goes straight from the source to the destination.

[esiebert7625 · Accepted solution]

Exactly, even if you select VirtualCenter as a destination the Source computer initially contacts the VC server (to create the VM) but the actual data copy is between the source computer and ESX directly (destination).

[thomps01]

Brilliant, case close.

Thanks